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30 Years After Les Immatériaux Art Science And
Theory 1st Edition Edition Andreas Broeckmann Digital
Instant Download
Author(s): Andreas Broeckmann, Yuk Hui
ISBN(s): 9783957960320, 3957960320
Edition: 1st Edition
File Details: PDF, 7.16 MB
Year: 2015
Language: english
30 YEARS

LES

IMMATÉRIAUX
HUI

BROECKMANN

ART

SCIENCE

THEORY
30 Years after Les Immatériaux
Bibliographical Information of the German National Library
The German National Library lists this publication in the Deutsche
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www.meson-press.com

Design concept: Torsten Köchlin, Silke Krieg

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ISBN (Print): 978-3-95796-030-6

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30 Years after
Les Immatériaux:
Art, Science,
and Theory
edited by
Yuk Hui and Andreas Broeckmann
Contents

Yuk Hui and Andreas Broeckmann: Introduction 9

PART I: DOCUMENT

Jean-François Lyotard: After Six Months of Work… (1984) 29

P A R T I I : A R T

Antony Hudek: From Over- to Sub-Exposure: The Anamnesis of

Les Immatériaux 71

Jean-Louis Boissier in conversation with Andreas Broeckmann:

The Production of Les Immatériaux 93

Jean-Louis Boissier: The Bus of Les Immatériaux 109

Francesca Gallo: Contemporary Art as “Immatériaux”:

Yesterday and Today 119

Thierry Dufrêne: Les Immatériaux: An “Immodern” Project 137

PART III: THEORY

Bernard Stiegler: The Shadow of the Sublime: On

Les Immatériaux 147

Anne Elisabeth Sejten: Exhibiting and Thinking: An Anamnesis

of the Postmodern 159

Yuk Hui: Anamnesis and Re-Orientation: A Discourse on

Matter and Time 179
Charlie Gere: The Silence of God 203

Robin Mackay: Immaterials, Exhibition, Acceleration 215

Daniel Birnbaum and Sven-Olov Wallenstein: From Immaterials

to Resistance: The Other Side of Les Immatériaux 245

Bibliograhpy 269
Image Credits 271
Authors 273
Introduction

Yuk Hui and Andreas Broeckmann

The Postmodern in Les Immatériaux

In 1985, the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, together with the
design theorist Thierry Chaput, curated the exhibition Les Immatériaux at
the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. He had accepted an invitation by the
Minister for Culture and the Center for Industrial Creation (CCI). Six years after
Lyotard’s report on The Postmodern Condition (1979),1 the exhibition dem-
onstrated the hypothesis which he had described in the report. The objects
and artworks shown expressed his observations of what was happening in
domains such as art, science and philosophy, under the new condition of com-
munication technologies. Lyotard’s report is considered to be a response to
another report by Simon Nora and Alain Minc, in the 1970s, which proposed
the “computerisation of society” 2. Nora and Minc’s project lead to the devel-
opment of the French Minitel system. According to Lyotard, the new “post-
modern” condition demanded a new sensibility, as he stated in the principle
proposition for the exhibition: “The insecurity, the loss of identity, the crisis
is not expressed only in economy and the social, but also in the domains of
the sensibility, of the knowledge and the power of man (futility, life, death),
the modes of life (in relation to work, to habits, to food, … etc.).” 3 A constant
return to the postmodern condition became a general method of Lyotard’s
philosophical thinking to go beyond the modern imagination, and guided the
construction of the exhibition which was, in his own words, a “manifestation”,
a “non-exhibition”.

1 Jean-François Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1979).

2 Charlie Gere, Art, Time and Technology (Oxford: Berg, 2006), p. 139.
3 Les Immatériaux catalogue, Album (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1985), p. 26.
10 30 Years after Les Immatériaux

The title of the exhibition Les Immatériaux demonstrates a form of resistance

against the modern conception of materiality. The original title for the project
that the CCI had initiated already in 1981, before Lyotard got involved in 1983,
was Création et matériaux nouveaux. This title was changed several times:
Matériau et création, Matériaux nouveaux et création, La Matière dans tous ses
états, before it was finally announced to the public as Les Immatériaux.4 The
etymological root mât refers to making by hand, to measure, to construct.
The moderns since Descartes conceive a dualism and hence an opposition
between the res cogitans and the res extensa; the thinking mind becomes the
foundation of knowledge and also the judge of what is real. As Lyotard wrote:
“In the tradition of modernity, the relation of the human with materials is fixed
by the Cartesian programme: to become master and possessor of nature. A
free will imposes its ends to the given sense data to divert them away from
their natural sense. It will determine their end with the help of language which
allows it to articulate what is possible (a project) and to impose it upon what is
real (matter).” 5

Hence Lyotard considered that a title such as matériaux nouveaux would

only perpetuate the modern conception, while using the prefix im- could
introduce a moment of self-reflection: “The exhibition [manifestation] entitled
Les Immatériaux has the purpose of presenting [ faire sentir] how much this
relation is altered by the fact of new materials. In this extended sense, the new
materials are not only new materials, they interrogate an idea of the human
who works, who projects, who remembers: of an author.”6 The immaterial is
fundamentally material. The point was not to appreciate the new materiality
brought by the telecommunication technologies, but rather to question the
relation between man and his desire to become the master of matter. The
aim of calling it “immaterial”, like the designation of the “postmodern”, was
to liberate man from the modern paradigm, and to release material from the
prison of the industrial revolution.

At the time, Lyotard had just finished writing Le Differénd, a book dedicated
to the philosophy of Kant and Wittgenstein, in which Lyotard wanted to
re-read the history of philosophy according to what was called the linguistic
turn.7 The differend refers to an unresolved conflict due to the lack of rules or
metanarratives which are common to two different systems of discourse. We
should also recognise that language was always at the centre of his thoughts,
as was already evident since his PhD thesis, which was later published as

4 Antony Hudek, “From Over- to Sub-Exposure: The Anamnesis of Les Immatériaux”, in this
volume, p. 72.
5 Les Immatériaux catalogue, Album (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1985), p. 16.
6 Ibid.
7 Jean-François Lyotard, Le Différend (Paris: Minuit, 1983).
 Introduction 11

matière
[referent]

référent
[referent]

destinateur destinataire
[sender] [receiver] message
maternité matériel
[maternity] [message] [hardware]

matériau
[support]

code
[code]
matrice
[matrix]

[Figure 1] Communication diagram (Source: Petit Journal, 28 March–15 July 1985, Paris, p. 2.
Centre Pompidou, MNAM, Bibliothèque Kandinsky).

Discours, Figure (1971). 8 The question of language was hence fundamental

to Lyotard’s conceptualisation of this exhibition, especially since telecom-
munication technology had created a new materiality of language between
senders and receivers; or more fundamentally, it served as the basis of the
postmodern turn. The conception of language as a tool also characterises
modernity, because “modernity presupposes that everything speaks, this
means that so long as we can connect to it, capture it, translate it and inter-
pret it, there is no fundamental difference between data and a phrase; there
is no fundamental difference between a phenomenon of displacement in an
electromagnetic spectrum and a logical proposition”.9 But it is also such an
equivalence that allows Lyotard to develop an ontology of the material or
immaterial according to a model of telecommunication: matériau/medium,
matériel/receiver (destinataire), maternité/emitter (destinateur), matière/
referent, and matrice/code [Figure 1]. The new materiality was mapped onto
the model of telecommunication. The objects and artworks in the exhibition,
as well as the 60 sites at which they were presented, were also classified and
ordered according to these five categories.

Art and Science in Question

Lyotard compared the displacement of the electromagnetic spectrum and log-
ical propositions, and continued: “given this fact, in this face-to-face relation
to a universe that is his to dominate – a heroic relation, I would say – in order
to make himself the master of it, man must become something else entirely:
the human subject becomes no longer a subject but, I would say, one case
among others, albeit a case which retains this privilege, until proven otherwise

8 Jean-François Lyotard, Discours, Figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971), translated into English by
Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon, Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
9 From Lyotard’s report, “Après six mois de travail”; see this volume, p. 33.
12 30 Years after Les Immatériaux

(which is extremely improbable)”.10 It was clear to the curatorial team that

technology was not the cause of a rupture, but rather the sign of the decline
of the figure of the modern, and that at the same time technology made
this modern project reflect upon itself, and destabilise itself.11 In Lyotard’s
words, technology places humanity once again in a condition of childhood,
of immaturity. This reference to immaturity is in direct contrast to what Kant
defined as the project of the Enlightenment, namely to overcome the con-
dition of Unmündigkeit.

Unmündigkeit, however, is not opposed to maturity; rather it is opposed

to authority, or more precisely, to the authority that legislates as the sole
voice. Scientific knowledge has been such an authority, which not only
demythologises the universe, but also has a demoralising impact upon what
Lyotard calls the problem of legitimation.12 The postmodern also questions
a certain hegemony of authority and hence radically opens up the way that
knowledge is acquired and narrated. The arrival of the postmodern demands
a sensitivity to the material conditions, at the same time as it gives us a
new sensibility of living. In the 1980s and ‘90s, we saw the celebration of the
postmodern, as a liberation from the shackles of rules, codes, oppositions,
and especially of the modern; a celebration which was evident in almost
all domains listed in the exhibition: alimentation, perfume, architecture,
urbanism, art, astrophysics and physics, biology and genetics, writing, habitat,
mathematics, money, music, theatre, dance etc. The setting of the exhibition
is probably the best illustration of this. It presents us with a labyrinth in which
every object is at once familiar and strange. Envisaging the construction of
the exhibition space, Lyotard proposed to go back to an idea of Denis Diderot
who, when reviewing the paintings of Claude Joseph Vernet in the 1767 Salon,
presented them not as pictures to be viewed following the traditional logic
of the division of gallery space, but rather described them as real sites, in the
form of disorientations of space.

The exhibition arose from an effort to move the concept of the postmodern
outside of books and to find its support in other objects, such as scientific,
industrial and art objects. This approach reflected a global vision, without
referring specifically to social and economic aspects.13 The exhibited objects
tended to bring in new forms of thinking that would call the modern into ques-

10 Ibid.
11 “Deuxième état des immatériaux”, Archive of Centre Pompidou, March 1984.
12 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p.
6–9.
13 According to the testimony of member of the curatorial team Chantel Nöel, from
“La Règle du Jeu: Matérialiser Les Immatériaux – Entretien avec l’équipe du C.C.I”, in
Modernes, et après? "Les Immatériaux", ed. Élie Théofilakis (Paris: Édition Autrement,
1985). This distance from social and economic aspects was however disputed between
the team members in the interview.
 Introduction 13

tion. In quantum mechanics, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle claims that

we cannot know the location and speed of a particle simultaneously. Speed
and location are two important concepts in classical mechanics, since it is the
displacement of location and duration that gives us velocity and acceleration.
The presence of particles can now only be imagined in terms of probabilities.
This involves both a mathematical reduction as well as a dematerialisation
of objects in our universe, including stars, galaxies, bodies and mind. For
example, the first seconds of the birth of the universe are represented by
means of a quantifiable model with which we can explain the genesis of the
cosmos, as if there were human subjects who witnessed the process.

We might say that the cosmic mystery has changed through the discovery of
the “immaterial”. The universe is no longer either a stable mechanical model
or a perfect self-organising organism. We can not only observe the movement
of the stellar bodies, but also witness their birth and death. What does such
a change in scientific discovery mean? In the minutes of a meeting of the
curatorial team from 20th March 1984 dedicated to this topic14 there is a tes-
timony from the astrophysicist Michel Cassé, one of the participants of the
exhibition: “Why is the universe so equivocal? Why is the rate of expansion
as it is? If it was different, we wouldn’t be here interrogating ourselves: a uni-
verse more dense would shut itself down before all appearance of life. The
miraculous coincidences, are they not inevitable in every universe that shelter
a conscious observer?”

The art objects in the exhibition pose similar questions and affirm the
uncertainty brought about by new techniques. These objects remain, in a
certain sense, instrumental in demonstrating Lyotard’s vision of the post-
modern. More than anything, Les Immatériaux performed the disappearance
of the body, both in the presentation of the objects and in the audience’s
experience. The new body and mind materialise in the form of codes. At
the entrance there was an Egyptian bas-relief sculpture, followed by a long
and dark corridor. Visitors had to wear headphones and listen to the sound-
track, playing different programmes of spoken texts in 26 different zones
throughout the exhibition space. After passing through the corridor, one
entered the Théâtre du non-corps dedicated to Samuel Beckett, which showed
five dioramas installed by Beckett’s set designer, Jean-Claude Fall. There was
no actor, or rather there were actors without bodies: the first direct reflection
upon the modern gaze. From here began five different, intersecting paths,
with more than 60 sites. For example, corresponding to the category Matériau,
the site entitled Deuxième peau showed different types of grafts made of pork
skins, cultivated skins, and artificial skins. Another site, entitled L’ange, dis-
played a large photograph of Annegret Soltau’s Schwanger (1978), which shows
the artist’s body in different stages of a pregnancy.

14 Document from the Archive of Centre Pompidou.

14 30 Years after Les Immatériaux

In the category Matrice, the site called Jeu d’échecs showed the heuristics of
a chess game with computers; codes were everywhere, even machines that
calculated the statistics of visitors. Through the lens of technical objects, vis-
itors would confront the limit of their own bodies, and the complexity of the
universe. In the category Materiel, for instance, there was a documentary film
about the birth and death of stars projected on a big screen.

For Lyotard, the most fundamental aspect of the transformations mapped

in Les Immatériaux is language. In a documentary about the exhibition titled
Octave au pays des immatériaux, Lyotard concluded the film by saying that
“language is the most immaterial system that material has succeeded in
forming” [le langage est le système le plus immatériel que la matière ait réussi
à former]. In fact, we can probably understand that the coding of materials
brings them closer and closer to the form of messages. Hence after passing
along the five categories of objects and artworks, the exhibition displays
another set of works in a space entitled Labyrinthe du language, dedicated to
Jorge Luis Borges. Not only the materiality of writing has changed, but also its
form of presentation, the way it is written.

The art historian Charlie Gere has observed that the artistic programme of the
exhibition “was not just a reflection of Lyotard’s own taste, but an expression
of his strongly held belief that only such work could properly express or invoke
the sublime.”15 What would be the sublime that this exhibition sought after?
On this point, Lyotard returned to the aesthetic judgement of Kant, especially
the feeling of the sublime. Kant defines the sublime as “the mere capacity of
thinking which evidences a faculty of mind transcending every standard of
the senses.”16 Like aesthetic judgement, the sense feeling is not subsumed by
any concept; but unlike aesthetic judgement, it involves the imagination and
reason instead of the understanding and the imagination. We can speculate
that the exhibition put the sublime itself into question, for the sublime is
no longer only a question of aesthetics but also a question of politics, one
that is deeply grounded in culture and history. Clement Greenberg saw
modernism as a response to what he called “the romantic crisis“ around the
mid-19th century.17 Since then modernism has not ceased to be self-critical.
In contrast, the postmodern – especially Lyotard’s reading of Kant’s reflective
judgement – resonates with the work of the early Romantics such as Friedrich
Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. We may say that, for Lyotard, what the postmodern
responds to is precisely the belief or the illusion of the stable and self-critical
figure of the human. Lyotard makes a strong distinction between situation

15 Gere, Art, Time and Technology, p. 147.

16 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith and Nicolas Walker
(Oxford University Press, 2007), §25, p. 81.
17 Clement Greenberg, “Modern and Postmodern”, Arts, 54, No.6 (February 1980), www.
sharecom.ca/greenberg/postmodernism.html.
 Introduction 15

and presentation (Darstellung).18 Art as presentation or as re-presentation is

restricted, for Lyotard, to the understanding of Kant’s first Critique. The sub-
lime must manifest itself as contradiction, or conflict between the imagination
and reason. On one hand, the imagination confronts its limit to represent that
which it cannot present; on the other hand, reason has to violate the interdict
that it itself poses of not going beyond the concepts of sensible intuition.19
The sublime is not about conformity (to concepts), but rather contradiction
arises at the moment of here and now as an event (Ereignis) in the sense of
Heidegger, or more precisely in the question: arrive-t-il? 20 In relation to this
supposition, the following is crucial for our inquiry: Lyotard’s discourse on
the sublime did not concern so much whether technology-based art can give
us the sublime or not. Instead, we should re-situate the whole discourse of
the postmodern and Lyotard’s ambivalent feeling about technology and its
relation to postmodernity. Lyotard posed the question of the relationship
between art and technology at the end of a lecture entitled “Something like:
communication… without communication”:

The question raised by the new technologies in connection to their

relation to art is that of the here-and-now. What does “here” mean on the
phone, on television, at the receiver of an electronic telescope? And the
“now”? Does not the “tele-” element necessarily obscure the presence, the
“here-and-now” of the forms and their “carnal” reception? What is a place,
a moment, not anchored in the immediate “suffering” of what happens
[arrive]. Is a computer in any way here and now? Can anything happen
[arriver] with it? Can anything happen to it? 21

Matter and Sentiment

Here we can see doubts and questions in the face of rapid technological devel-
opment and industrialisation. In the article “Logos and Techne, or Telegraphy”,
published in the collection L’Inhuman (1988), Lyotard wrote: “The question of
a hegemonic teleculture on a world scale is already posed.” 22 This doubt of
Lyotard concerning the relation between the postmodern and technologies
also results in its critique. From the 1990s up to today, we can locate different
efforts that try to situate the postmodern in a large historical perspective in
order to find a way out of the melancholia accompanied by the liberation.

18 Élise Marrou, “De Lyotard à Wittgenstein: un différend? Anthropocentrisme et acos-

misme”, in Lyotard à Nanterre (Klincksieck, 2010).
19 Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 55.
20 Jean-François Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde”, in The Inhuman: Reflections on
Time (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 93.
21 Jean-François Lyotard, “Something like: communication… without communication”, in
The Inhuman, p. 118 (translation modified).
22 Jean-François Lyotard, “Logos and Techne, or Telegraphy”, in The Inhuman, p. 50.
16 30 Years after Les Immatériaux

According to the analysis of art historian Nicolas Bourriaud, the postmodern is

the epoch of melancholia. Taking up the theory of German philosopher Peter
Sloterdijk, Bourriaud proposed that this melancholia comes from disillusion-
ment with the superabundance of energy and resources and the power of
conquest, especially the energy crisis in 1973 and the end of the 30 glorious
years (1945–75) in France. Bourriaud proposed what he calls “the Altermodern”
as the successor to the Postmodern, an epoch in which everyone is uprooted
from their proper culture and becomes a nomad, a homo viator. 23 It seems
to us that this figure still falls squarely within the discourse of the post-
modern, however. In fact reflection on the melancholia of the postmodern was
addressed by Lyotard during the preparation of this exhibition, in a document
entitled Deuxième état des immatériaux, dated March 1984. According to this
document, the exhibition wanted to reflect in its mise en scène the melancholia
brought by the failure of Europe’s and America’s extension of the Enlight-
enment project. This distance from an enlightened, bright and transparent
society created a sorrow (chagrin) among their people. 24

With the project of the present publication, 30 years after Les Immatériaux and
35 years after the appearance of the La Condition postmoderne, we wanted to
investigate what has been happening in the wake of their epochal hypotheses
and observations; or more precisely, what has been happening to the ques-
tion of the postmodern. No doubt, many things have happened. The social,
economic and political conditions have changed, and so have the technological
conditions. Digital technology perpetuates the modern desire for control and
mastery through networks, databases, algorithms and simulations. Digital
technology, which was once the figure instead of the ground, slowly becomes
the ground of governance, communication, and scientific research methods.
It seems to have not only challenged the epistemes of science and art, but
also their epistemologies. At the time of Les Immatériaux, the World Wide
Web had not yet appeared, Minitels were the main computational devices in
the exhibition, and some projects actually faltered because the curatorial
team had difficulties in finding a sufficiently powerful server. One of the most
significant projects in the Labyrinthe du language was Épreuves d’écriture, a col-
laborative online writing project which resulted in the second catalogue of the
exhibition. It invited 26 writers, including philosophers and social scientists
such as Jacques Derrida, Bruno Latour, François Chatelet, Christine Buci-
Glucksmann, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Isabelle Stengers and Dan Sperber,
to contribute commentaries on 50 keywords [Figure 2]. Over the course of
two months, the participants wrote small entries for each keyword, and at
the same time criticised, or commented upon, the entries and comments
of others. During the exhibition, the visitors could use five Minitel terminals

23 Nicolas Bourriaud, Altermodern (London: Tate Publishing, 2009).

24 “Deuxième état des immatériaux”, p. 4.
 Introduction 17

[Figure 2] François Chatelet with the Olivetti computer used for the Épreuves d’écriture writing
experiment (Source: Centre Pompidou, MNAM, Bibliotèque Kandinsky).

connected to a central server to access the entries either by keywords or by

the names of the authors. This was probably one of the earliest collective and
networked writing experiences, presented to the public when the computer
was not yet popular.

In art, we have since witnessed the rise and fall of new media art. On the
one hand we observe more and more intensive interdisciplinary collab-
oration with science and technologies; on the other hand, art, design and
technology are converging under the force of the culture industry. In science,
simulation has overturned the established epistemology, since scientific
experiments – the fundamental research method proposed by Francis Bacon
– now demand collaboration with computer simulations. In 2013 the Nobel
prize for chemistry went to Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh War-
shel, who since the 1970s have devoted themselves to the development of
molecular dynamics simulations. In the humanities, we have observed the
rise of a new, heavily funded discipline – digital humanities – coinciding, after
the concept of the inhuman proposed by Lyotard in 1986, with discourses on
the post-human, cyborgs, non-human, object-oriented philosophy, and so on.
In light of the transformation brought by telecommunications technologies,
we want to revisit Lyotard’s hypothesis of the destabilisation of the concept
of the modern. Where is this concept of the human going after the post-, the
beyond? Should we not demand a new way of orientation after mastery and
18 30 Years after Les Immatériaux

disorientation, perhaps an orientation that imposes neither a will to mastery

nor the misery of turbulence?

Reorientation: 30 Years after Les Immatériaux

If we can summarise the Modern as the will to mastery, and the Postmodern
as a celebration of disorientation, we propose that we should proceed to a re-
orientation which avoids both mastery and disorientation. Orientation is nec-
essarily anamnesis – that is to say, a recollection of what is past – in the minds,
in cultural objects, and in a new cartography. The initiative of conducting a
research project 30 years after Les Immatériaux is not only to pay homage to it,
and to understand its significance in historical perspective (in terms of art and
theory), but also to reflect upon the transformation of “postmodern culture”.

Politics. As for “disorientation”, the first sense of the word destroys order,
rules and roots; a second sense concerns the Orient and the Occident, a
geopolitical and cultural development under globalisation, supported by
technologies. Countries outside Europe, such as China, which are believed to
have never experienced modernity, suddenly had to adapt to the postmodern
discourse. How could we reassess this, 30 years later? If we need to rediscover
the sentiment, then the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan since late 2001, the credit crunch in 2008, and the Arab Spring in
2011, have brought melancholia to an end. Instead we can probably identify a
new sentiment in what Franco Berardi has conceptualised as a “state of panic”.
This panic comes not only from social and economic conditions, but also from
the networks of transmission: images and sounds of suicide attacks directly
reach our eyes through fibre cables; the figures of stock exchange rates are
instantly updated on the screens of our smartphones, tablets, and computers;
moreover, we are faced with the national surveillance schemes on telecom-
munication channels, and the proliferation of cyber-attacks. Re-orientation
demands a new vision of the conflicts between values and cultures, as well as
a new geopolitical order, which in turn calls for a new form of legitimacy.

Aesthetics. We observe that social, economic and political conditions have

reversed the promise of the postmodern. Think, for example, of Henry
Lefebvre’s postmodernist critique of Le Corbusier’s functionalism and the
desire to control in architectural and urban forms: “The street contains
functions that were overlooked by Le Corbusier: the informative function,
the symbolic function, the ludic function. The street is a place to play and
learn. The street is disorder.” 25 Today the disorder of the street becomes

25 Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003),
p. 18.
 Introduction 19

what Richard Florida pinpoints as the “creative city”. 26 Thus, the postmodern
critique becomes a tool of neoliberal discourse. According to Fredric Jameson,
the postmodern follows the logic of late capitalism, in a continuation of the
culture industry critiqued by Adorno and Horkheimer. 27 The disorientation
once celebrated as liberation can now be conceived as a source of sorrow. The
long-lasting post- comes and must come to its end.

Knowledge: The telecommunications technologies embody a model of com-

munication which is more interactive than ever. Within this new configuration,
the legitimacy of knowledge is firstly challenged by top-down authoritarian
legislation. The development of the digital has pervaded every aspect of our
daily life, yesterday’s Minitels have been replaced by personal computers,
pads and smartphones. Theorisation, as the editor of the Wired Magazine
Chris Anderson provocatively claimed, is coming to an end, since big data
will make it “obsolete”. What is rendered obsolete, however, is not only any
kind of narrative – whether “grand narratives” or “micro-narratives” – but
also any attempt at setting up hypotheses, constructing models and con-
ducting proofs, as they had been practised by science since the time of Francis
Bacon. 28

In recent years we have seen new titles such as Hypermodern, Supermodern

and Altermodern, which try to address the new condition after the post-
modern. In contrast, we believe that, in order to articulate this new phase, a
more historical and geopolitical dimension of the modern must be tackled,
and that a new imagination is required. In autumn 2013 the Centre Pompidou
hosted – on its 5th floor, where Les Immatèriaux had also been held – an
exhibition entitled Plural Modernities 1905–1970. This historical recognition
of Plural Modernities, though it affirmed cultural heterogeneity, seemed
indifferent to the concept of the modern itself, and to what happened after
the post-modern; to the sensibility produced by the material conditions,
which not only affect the way we look at the present, but also the past – i.e.,
world history. The past loses its power when it can no longer contribute to
the here and now; hence we feel the need to carry out an anamnesis of Les
Immatériaux.

26 Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming. Work, Leisure,
Community, and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
27 See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London:
Verso, 1991), and Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectics of the Enlightenment
(London: Verso, 1979).
28 Chris Anderson, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method
Obsolete”; online: archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory.
20 30 Years after Les Immatériaux

Structure of the Book

This book is divided into three parts. The first part, “Document”, offers the
first publication of the transcript of a report which Lyotard addressed –
probably to his colleagues – in the spring of 1984. The text does not have an
original title, which is why it is referred to according to its first words, “After
six months of work” (Après six mois de travail). In this text, Lyotard speaks
about conceptual, theoretical and practical considerations regarding the
preparations for the exhibition. It not only offers interesting insights into the
evolution of the guiding conceptual principles of Les Immatériaux, which were
subsequently translated into curatorial and scenographic decisions, but also
highlights the need to historicise the exhibition and its preparatory phase,
which had already begun in 1981 with extensive research by Chaput and his
team. This preparatory phase included a first conceptual sketch provided by
Lyotard in August 1983, which was then pinpointed by the report first trans-
lated into English here – a report whose opening words already point us to the
transitory, evolutionary work that would eventually lead to the exhibition.

The second part of the book focuses on the artistic programme of Les
Immatériaux and contains texts by art historians and artists who discuss
various aspects of the historical significance of Les Immatériaux. In the 2000s,
three art historians conducted extensive research into the background
and context of the exhibition: Francesca Gallo, Antony Hudek, and Antonia
Wunderlich. We have included a text by Hudek here, which offers a detailed
analysis of the main parameters of the exhibition, and homes in on the
relationship of its artistic and philosophical programmes. Hudek also con-
textualises Les Immatériaux in relation to contemporaneous developments in
conceptual and postmodern art.

Francesca Gallo has contributed a new text in which she highlights the
selection of some contemporary artists for the exhibition, especially some
female artists in whose work the notion of “the immaterial” features in a
particularly pertinent manner. Gallo also suggests that more recent internet-
based artworks continue the line of questioning communication and materi-
ality first proposed in the exhibition. 29

29 We had originally also planned to include a chapter from German art historian Antonia
Wunderlich’s book about Les Immatériaux entitled Der Philosoph im Museum (Bielefeld:
Transcript Verlag, 2008), in which she describes the “Phénoménologie de la visite” in
great detail, offering a most comprehensive account of what could actually be seen
and experienced in the exhibition. Wunderlich puts together a site-by-site description
of the exhibition, drawing on the catalogues as well as reviews, interviews and other
statements by members of the audience, journalists and team members. Regrettably,
the translation and reprint of this 150-page text, which is currently only available in
German, were impossible to realise for the present volume; it will, however, no doubt be
an important source for any future research on Les Immatériaux.
 Introduction 21

The French art historian Thierry Dufrêne contributes the hypothesis that, by
analogy with the conception of the “immaterial”, the exhibition also implicitly
proposed a concept of the “immodern”, which would not be the negation but
rather a specific inflection of the modern. Dufrêne situates the immodern as
the ontology of interaction, juxtaposing the modern (subject) and postmodern
(crisis).

The artist Jean-Louis Boissier has contributed two texts. One is an interview
conducted by Andreas Broeckmann in which Boissier speaks about the his-
torical context in which Les Immatériaux was realised. Importantly, he provides
insights into the curatorial and production process which do not belittle
Lyotard’s role and impact on the project, yet which underscore the importance
of the contributions of Thierry Chaput, Philippe Délis, the team of the CCI, as
well as the dozens of other cooperation partners and participants.

The impression that it is historically untenable to speak of Les Immatériaux

as “Lyotard’s exhibition” was confirmed by Lyotard himself when, in the 1984
report included in this volume, he repeatedly spoke about the team and
the consensual way of working. Even in the opening sentence of the report,
Lyotard refers to “the question of installation as we have collectively thought
it through”. With regard to the catalogue and what would become the “Album”,
documenting the preparations of Les Immatériaux, Lyotard acknowledged that
this volume would also “include the team’s working texts spanning almost
two years”, thus going back long before he himself joined the project. Lyotard
recounts that when he suggested some changes to the spatial layout of the
exhibition, “this proposition was rejected unanimously by the team almost
without discussion, without any argument – fundamentally rejected, as if the
team understood that we could not get to the root of this problem of post-
modern space through a rapid, controlled spatial layout of a plan for the
exhibition.” 30 Elsewhere in the report, speaking about the adaptation of the
concept of the postmodern to the exhibition space, Lyotard pointed to the
consensus within the planning team: “If now I take this barely sketched-out
model and transport it to the case of the exhibition, asking myself, there-
fore, what a postmodern exhibition corresponding to the metropolis or to the
nebula of conurbation could be, then I am indeed obliged – and this is what
we have all concluded – we are obliged to refuse the traditional dispositif of the
gallery and the salon – that is to say, the dispositif which opposes, for example,
rooms and the corresponding corridors, habitats and lines of circulation.” 31
In this passage, Lyotard expands the authorial subject of the exhibition by

30 Lyotard 1984, in this volume, p. 29, 63, and 55, respectively.

31 In this volume, p. 58 (emphasis added).
22 30 Years after Les Immatériaux

pointing to the organising team, indicating that the exhibition as a whole was
such a collective effort. 32

Boissier’s second contribution is a case study on the interactive installation

Le Bus, which he and his students at the University Paris 8 produced for Les
Immatériaux. The text is not only a detailed account of the project and of the
conditions under which it came about, but it also exemplifies how the items
and artworks on display in the exhibition each had a history before and after
Les Immatériaux. The text indicates how a detailed historical account of the
exhibition project as a whole will have to place a focus on many, if not each
of the individual objects and their producers, and the research that went into
them, in order to provide a full picture of what Les Immatériaux meant in the
broader context of art, science and theory, and the correspondences between
them.

The third part of the book contains six reflections on the philosophical ques-
tions posed by Lyotard and present in the exhibition, especially with regard to
the concept of anamnesis. Two former students of Lyotard’s, Bernard Stiegler
and Anne-Elisabeth Setjen, provide both an anamnesis of Lyotard’s exhibition
and of their personal exchanges with him. In her contribution, Setjen explores
the relation between Les Immatériaux and Lyotard’s reading of Kant’s Critique
of the Power of Judgement. Les Immatériaux demonstrates Kant’s concept of
reflective judgement, not only in the exhibition itself, but also for its students,
visitors, etc. It is in light of the différend that the reflective judgement becomes
autonomous in search of the sensus communis, or what she refers as the tran-
scendentaux. The postmodern, Sejten shows, can be read as the reincarnation
of Kant’s sublime, as well as an act of resistance against the “too human”
modern.

In contrast, Bernard Stiegler criticises Lyotard for having ignored the shadow
of the sublime. According to Stiegler, Lyotard didn’t see the relation between
techné and the sublime (the product of the imagination and reason) in a
profound way, and hence ignored a political economy of the immaterial which
has become more and more determined by industry. Stiegler goes back to
his early work Technics and Time 3, in which he developed the concept of the
fourth synthesis of the understanding, as a critique of Kant’s three syntheses:
namely, apprehension in intuition, reproduction in the imagination, and
recognition in a concept. The fourth synthesis is the exteriorised memory or
the tertiary retention, which conditions the other three. If one follows Kant
in saying that the faculties of the understanding, judgement and reason are
built upon one another, then there is also a relation between the sublime

32 In a future, more extensive research effort, the contributions of the participating

individuals and groups, and the chronology of their interactions, will have to be etched
into relief.
 Introduction 23

and techné. Stiegler shows that Lyotard’s interpretation of Kant lacks the
pharmacological critique which becomes urgent in our time.

Yui Hui’s and Charlie Gere’s texts offer two different readings of anamnesis
in relation to the exhibition. Situating the question of the Other in Lyotard’s
writings before and after the exhibition – The Differend (1983) and The
Inhuman (1988) – Hui’s text poses the question: Is the postmodern merely a
European project? The exhibition, for Lyotard, was an occasion to reflect on
a new metaphysics, one that distances itself from the modern. During the
preparation of the exhibition, Lyotard saw the possibility of locating such a
metaphysics in Spinoza or in the Japanese Zen Buddhist Dôgen. Lyotard posed
the intriguing question of whether the new technologies might give rise to the
possibility of achieving a form of anamnesis which he called “passage”. Lyotard
elaborated on his concept with reference to Freud’s concept of Durcharbeiten,
as well as to Dôgen’s concept of “the clear mirror”. Hui’s text addresses
Lyotard’s question by reflecting on the differences between the conceptions
of techné and anamnesis in the philosophical West and East, and suggests
pushing Lyotard’s question in the direction of a programme of re-orientation
in the global context.

Gere’s text proposes to understand the exhibition, and especially the use of
the headphones and their soundtrack, as an anamnesis of the Holocaust.
Reflecting on Lyotard’s writing on the hyphen in the expression “Judeo-
Christian”, and on Georgio Agamben’s critique of Derrida’s project of decon-
struction as a “thwarted messianism“ of “infinite deferment“, Gere proposes
that writing has sublated the difference between Judaism and Christianity, and
hence necessitates the repression and forgetting of the former by the latter.
Gere points out the references to Auschwitz in Les Immatériaux and suggests
that the use of the soundtrack and headphones can be interpreted as an
anamnesis of the lost voice of God in philosophy as “gramma“.

In their texts, Robin Mackay, and Daniel Birnbaum and Sven-Olov Wallen-
stein, explore the political dimension of Les Immatériaux as resistance.
Mackay provides a rich contextualisation of the exhibition within the politics
of the Centre Georges Pompidou, as well the role of the Centre Pompidou in
the development of the culture industry in France. He also offers an accel-
erationist reading of Lyotard’s exhibition as a critique of Nick Srnicek and Alex
Williams’s 2013 Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics, which suggests that
the acceleration of capital and technologies will speed up capitalism, as well
as lead to its self-destruction. Mackay proposes that Lyotard recognised the
double effect of such acceleration. It intensifies the inquietude of the human
subject in losing its role as master in the postmodern epoch (the first sense of
the inhuman), but also leads to its hyper-exploitation (the second sense of the
inhuman) without emancipation. Instead, Mackay considers Les Immatériaux as
a laboratory for a third way out.
24 30 Years after Les Immatériaux

Birnbaum and Wallenstein provide another reading of the resistance of Les

Immatériaux by offering speculations about a sequel exhibition that Lyotard
mentioned in his seminars (provisionally entitled Résistances), which was never
realised but which would supposedly have conceived resistance in terms of
“noise, distortion, and the dimension of experience that resists both con-
sciousness and language”. Birnbaum and Wallenstein’s text aims to recon-
struct this notion of resistance by going back to Lyotard’s earlier writings on
concepts such as touching, event and passibility. Birnbaum and Wallenstein
also locate the concept of resistance in Lyotard’s writings on aesthetics, and in
his interpretations of the work of Karel Appel, Sam Francis and others. Their
text resonates with those of Hui and Sejten on Lyotard’s search for a concept
of anamnesis that would break from the traditional conception of the relation
between technology and memory.

This book derives from a research project that began in the summer of 2013
at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg. The aim of the project has from its
outset been to provide an historical account of both the art and theory of this
mysterious exhibition, Les Immatériaux, 30 years after its occurrence. Given
the significance of Les Immatériaux, this publication is only the beginning of
a reconstruction of the epochal transformation of these past decades. We
would like to thank Leuphana University and our colleagues at the Centre
for Digital Cultures for the opportunity to work on this important project,
especially Claus Pias, Timon Beyes, Tina Ebner, Mathias Fuchs, Erich Hörl and
Andreas Bernard, who have provided valuable support throughout the last
two years. The funding of our work was provided through the Hybrid Pub-
lishing Lab and the research group on Art and Civic Media in the EU Innovation
Incubator project of Leuphana University. In Paris, our research has been
made possible by the Centre Pompidou and its staff, where Nicolas Roche,
Didier Schulmann, Jean Charlier and Jean-Philippe Bonilli were more than
helpful in giving us access to the resources in the Archives. We are also
grateful for instructive conversations with Jean-Louis Boissier, Thierry
Dufrêne, Anne-Marie Duguet and Bernard Stiegler. At Meson Press, Mercedes
Bunz, Marcus Burckhardt and Andreas Kirchner have made the publication
possible. We would like to extend special thanks to Madame Dolores Lyotard
for generously granting us the copyrights of the unedited text of Jean-François
Lyotard, and to Robin Mackay for the translations from the French. We also
would like to thank Damian Veal and Thomas Munz for their diligence in
correcting and cleaning up the manuscript. Last but not least, we would like
to thank the authors for their contributions and discussions. Together, we will
take it from here.
PA RT I: DOCUMENT
After Six Months of
Work… (1984)

Jean-François Lyotard

After six months of work in partnership with the team at the Centre de
Création Industrielle (CCI), and with one year to go before the opening of
the exhibition entitled Les Immatériaux, I would like to take stock, firstly by
making a few clarifications concerning the conception of this exhibition, then
by setting out the question of installation as we have collectively thought
it through, and reporting on our intended responses to the question of
installation, or at least their general direction. Those are the principal points
that I would like to cover here.

The initial title of the exhibition, as stated in the plan of the Centre Georges
Pompidou, was Les nouveaux matériaux et la creation [New Materials and
Creation]. Such a title obviously brings with it a whole way of thinking, a whole
horizon of thinking which we might set out as follows: in making a very fine-
grained analysis of natural givens, intelligence arrives at certain elements;
it synthesises these elements, it reorganises them, aided by the creative
imagination, and in this way engenders hitherto unknown objects. And the
philosopher, when he scans this horizon, recognises the figure of modernity,
which is perpetuated in the form of a subject that is intelligent, imaginative,
and voluntary, a subject that takes hold of a world of given objects and
analyses them – that is to say, a subject that reduces them to their finest, most
imperceptible elements, and proves his mastery of these givens by creating
from these elements completely new tools, new materials, new matter, even.

By calling the exhibition Immatériaux, we had, if I may say so, a number of

claims in mind. Firstly, we must understand materials in a broad sense, as we
have already written, extending the meaning of the word material [matériau]
to also cover referents [matières], hardware [matériels], matrices [matrices],
30 30 Years after Les Immatériaux

and even maternity [maternité]. Tracing the common origin of these terms to
the sense of the root mât, which means both measurement and construction,
we tried to rethink everything that the modern project, the project of the
figure of the subject I just mentioned, tends to treat as a sort of passivity to be
conquered, as data to be analysed. That is to say that I would like personally,
in my capacity as a philosopher, to give the word “material” a philosophical
pertinence that necessarily exceeds the sense of the word as it is used, for
example, by the architect or the painter. If in saying “material” I also under-
stand something as maternity – that is to say, as origin – then obviously I am
posing a problem, that of authentication – a problem of authority, a problem
of beginnings; and from that point of view, the term “material” immediately
raises a question that is generally not considered in relation to the figure
of modernity – precisely that of the intelligent, imaginative, and voluntary
origin which exerts its domination, its hegemony, its mastery, over what is
given. That is the first point. Of course, by distinguishing between content
[matière], hardware [matériel], matrix [matrice], maternity [maternité], and
support [matériau], we seek to redistribute the term “material”, which as
a term remains rather vague with regard to certain extremely precise and
specific functions that are generally distinct for the communications engineer,
for example, but also for the linguist and, probably, for the philosopher. This
is why, in the first project plan connected with this exhibition, we took as
a reference-point the model of the structure of communication that dis-
tinguishes between the sender and the recipient of a message – which already
gives us two instances – but also the code in which this message is written
– a third instance – the support upon which it is written – a fourth instance
– and the referent of the message – a fifth instance. It seemed to us that we
could distribute the different roots of mât in accordance with this structure
of communication in a way that is necessarily arbitrary yet convenient, one
that would give us a sorting mechanism for the enormous amount of things
that the subject demanded we deal with. Thus we decided that the sense
of maternity obviously belonged to the role of the sender, the sender being
the father or mother, as you wish, of the message. As for the word content
[matière], on the other hand, if we follow the usage that is common in high
schools, colleges, teaching establishments, and libraries, when we speak of
content we mean what the message is about, the matter of which it speaks
– that is to say, the referent; thus content becomes referent, content comes
under the pole of the referent – when we speak of content in the com-
municational structure, it is the referent pole we are discussing. Similarly,
matrix [matrice] can be identified, a little arbitrarily, yet not insignificantly, with
the code in which the message is written, and hardware [matériels] are the
means of transmission of the message; the hardware is the way in which the
message is carried, transported from sender to recipient; these two are there-
fore devices for the transmission and capture of messages, whatever they may
 After Six Months of Work... (1984) 31

be. And then the support [matériau] proper can be identified with the material
medium of the message – that of which the message is made. Distributing the
different senses of the word mât in accordance with the structure of com-
munication in this way, we have at our disposal a way of filtering out what will
interest us in the exhibition, of choosing what will be pertinent in relation to
our problem.

We must of course emphasise the fact that, in taking this communicational

structure as a paradigm and at the same time as a filtering mechanism
for what we want to show, we have accepted the hypothesis that belongs
specifically to modernity, namely that every given is a message. What I mean
is that if, for example, we take the case of architecture, and think about it in
terms of this structure of communication, we are saying that, for example,
the building, or this room, is itself a message, that this message has a sender,
that is to say that it is engendered by a maternity [maternité], that it has an
author who authenticates it; that it aims at a recipient and therefore that it
can be grasped in specific ways by specific hardware [matériel]; that it is in
some way inscribed in a support medium [matériau] according to a code that
is its matrix [matrice]; and finally that this building has a referent [matière]
– that is, it “speaks” of something. The same would apply if it were a ques-
tion of a painting (to stay within the domain of the arts), but also if it were a
question of a light signal emanating from a sun many millions of light-years
away; and it would be the same if it were a question of mutant bacteria in a
biochemical laboratory – these, also, would be treated as a message. This is
an idea that has become commonplace. It is closely linked to the very idea of
modernity, for it is evidently only at the cost of making every given a message
that the hegemony of the intelligence, will, and imagination of the subject can
be applied to a given, for this application means very simply that the given
must be understood as a sign, and thus as referring, and as being immediately
integrable into language. Basically it will always be a question of asking: What
does it speak of? How does it speak? What does it speak with? What speaks
and what does it speak to? Presupposed in the very idea of modernity is the
idea that everything speaks, and that it is enough, in short, to find the constit-
uent elements of the message, since it is these elements that are given by the
structure of communication itself. The message is controlled and controllable
once all of these instances have been defined. In this sense, then, there is
nothing new here in relation to the modern project, but a rather precise way
of stretching the meaning of the word “material”, like a sort of fabric, in order
to draw it, to stretch it over the structure of communication which is, to my
eyes – and I believe that we all agree on this now – the very figure of modernity
in its treatment of what is given.

But as you have obviously noticed, we do not say “material”, we say

“immaterial”. And when we say immaterial, we obviously mean something
32 30 Years after Les Immatériaux

extremely precise: that the contemporary situation – which of course remains

to be described – this project of modernity which extends its communicational
web to the totality of all possible givens so as to be able to control them by
way of translation; in short – since it is a question of translation, a question
of the message – that this project is realised fully in the contemporaneity in
which we find ourselves today, and which I characterise essentially on the one
hand as technoscientific, and on the other as historical – though we may come
back to these two points; that this project, then, linked to these structures, is
fully realised; but that at the same time this very realisation, this completion
of modernity, destabilises the figure of modernity and that, by dint of its very
perfection, it arouses disquiet. In particular, the negation im- in “immaterials”
indicates the situation of a face-to-face, a confrontation that opposes the
subject, the subject of will, of spirit, of the gaze, to that which is not him,
and which falls under the general denomination mât. This face-to-face situ-
ation, then, is undermined today. It is undermined not only, as I have said,
by technoscience; it is undermined by what I just now called history – that is
to say, by a sort of chagrin which, in the twentieth century, has replaced the
hope that had been opened up by modernity in the strict sense at the end of
the eighteenth century, two centuries ago. This chagrin is what I would call the
contemporary historical sentiment, insofar as, certainly, most of the hopes
of the Enlightenment era – which were not solely technoscientific, but also
political – are, I would not say thwarted, but in any case unfinished – this is
the object of a discussion with Jürgen Habermas concerning the completion
or otherwise of this project of modernity. What I want to say is that, precisely
because it results from this project, in a sense not only does technoscience
upset and undermine that project, but that in the order of global politics for
the last two centuries, the idea of an enlightened, luminous society, a society
transparent to itself, whether we call it a socialist or liberal society, it doesn’t
really matter, has receded considerably for us today – and this is what I call
chagrin. And in this sense, by calling this exhibition Les Immatériaux, we
mean, among other things, that it is a question of contributing to a sort of
work of mourning for modernity. We must mourn for modernity, or at least
certain aspects of modernity that today seem illusory or dangerous; and we
must propose this precisely on the occasion of a reflection on the structure
of communication and on its pertinence to the contemporary context. I
would say, to jump ahead a little, that what is striking in this completion of
the modern project, this hegemony over objects, which at the same time is a
destabilisation of the modern project – what is striking is that, on the technos-
cientific level, we see a sort of reinforcement, an exaggeration almost, of
the intimacy between the mind and things. For example, the software that
is coming into general use on all scales is mind incorporated into matter;
synthetic products, polymers for example, and all such chemical derivatives,
are matters that are a result of knowledge – they are instigated by the mind.
 After Six Months of Work... (1984) 33

Biochemical, or more precisely, biogenetic manipulations, genetics, show

that the mind itself, in its most intimate properties and characteristics, can
be treated as matter, because it is matter. When modernity presupposes that
everything speaks, this means that so long as we can connect to it, capture it,
translate it and interpret it, there is no fundamental difference between data
and a phrase; there is no fundamental difference between a phenomenon of
displacement in an electromagnetic spectrum and a logical proposition, and
given this fact, in this face-to-face relation to a universe that is his to dominate
– a heroic relation, I would say – in order to make himself the master of it,
man must become something else entirely: the human subject becomes no
longer a subject but, I would say, one case among others, albeit a case which
retains this privilege, until proven otherwise (which is extremely improbable):
that we can well imagine that there is no similar case in the whole universe,
subject to a complete inventory being made. Yet it is just one case among the
many multiple interactions that constitute the universe. You see that, from
this “immaterials” point of view, we have emphasised – and this is a part of
the work of mourning – a kind of counter-figure that takes shape within the
figure of modernity, a counter-figure within which man does not play the
role of the master. One might call this figure postmodern, insofar as it has
always been present in modernity, but it might be the very completion of the
technoscientific project of modernity. And as this project is destabilised, it
allows this counter-figure to appear more clearly than before. I would say that
we could call it postmodern insofar as this counter-figure brings with it a sort
of disappointment in regard to the project of domination, and that it con-
sists in mourning it; but I would say that this makes the figure rather cheerful
because, once mourning is over, then happiness comes. But of course this
counter-figure is uncertain. And above all, I would say that what this exhibition
is interested in – probably the most important thing – is that we know very
well that there was a metaphysics corresponding to the technoscience of
domination, which was the metaphysics of the subject, the metaphysics of
Descartes and of all thinking of the subject up to and including the twentieth
century; but that we are not sure what kind of metaphysics could be
appropriate to the technoscience of interaction. Not only what metaphysics,
what thought, but also what politics, since it is easy to see what the politics of
the subject corresponding to the technoscience of domination was: precisely
the politics of state power, I would say. If not that of the totalitarian state then
in any case that of the hegemonic state – a state that, moreover, allows, before
its very eyes, the development of capital as the truth of the metaphysics of will
and domination. But this metaphysics is becoming less and less pertinent – I
think many scientists are aware of this – for contemporary technosciences
and contemporary politics alike. I don’t mean to say that the hegemony of the
state and of capital has disappeared – far from it, alas – but that in a certain
sense it was already destroyed, that we no longer expect any good, any justice,
34 30 Years after Les Immatériaux

from these figures, and that, consequently, it falls to us to find a thought and
a practice within the framework of the technoscience of interaction – one
which, in short, would break from the thought and the practice of science, of
technology, and of domination. And in a certain sense, it is this formidable
problem that Les Immatériaux tries to pose. More formidable yet would be the
claim that, in this exhibition, we have to pose the problem that is linked to
postmodernity – that is to say, the question of what kind of political power is
compatible with a generalised figure of interaction.

Following these few clarifications concerning the project plan, and before
tackling the question of its actual spatial layout [mise en espace], I would like to
turn to some associations surrounding the term “immaterials” – and these are
associations rather than analyses. For me, the word “immaterial” is associated
primarily with the word “immature”, which is an English word, but one that is
increasingly used in French. By immature I mean that, with this technoscience,
as with this new politics in waiting, there is something childlike in our con-
temporary situation. Within the figure of modernity, childhood was a situation
in which that which belongs to nature and that which belongs to culture – or
rather, I would say, that which belongs to matter and that which belongs to
language – is not yet dissociated, is indiscernible, indiscernibly combined,
mixed. There is a sort of admixture of nature in culture and of culture in
nature that is characteristic of childhood. Now, if there is indeed, as I said,
such an intimacy of the mind and of matter in the new technology, then one
might characterise the latter as placing humanity in a situation of childhood.
To take an example from architecture, in the Discourse on Method a whole
page – more than one in fact – is dedicated to a comparison between the
construction of a rational method and the organisation and construction of a
city. Descartes complains – or at least pretends to complain – that these cities
were not constructed rationally but were made bit by bit, neighbourhood by
neighbourhood, according to needs, according to demographics, invasions,
the requirements of new trades, population growth or decline; and that all of
this obviously leads to great disorder, whereas if a city could be constructed,
as we would say today, to plan – that is to say first of all on paper – then we
would see clearly in this city, we would be able to orient ourselves in it very
easily; the method being, at least in this text, in Descartes’s eyes (at least
this particular Descartes) something like a plan of domination specifying
the procedures to be employed in order to master an object of knowledge.
Well, in today’s situation, what is called the crisis of architecture precisely
tends toward a kind of turning away from this idea, which was still that of the
modern movement in architecture – that of an entirely programmed, entirely
predictable organisation of architectural and urban space. On the contrary,
this crisis consists in perceiving that the charm, what I would call the almost
ontological beauty and value of Italian cities, comes from the fact that they
were in fact constructed exactly in the way that Descartes complains of – in
 After Six Months of Work... (1984) 35

a non-dominated way, always in close proximity to the event, an event that

could be either the taking possession of the city by some prince of another
city, or the accession to power within the city itself of a suddenly rich family,
or else the necessity of opening a new space for popular representation
– all of this means that the classes, for example, and the routes one finds
through these Italian cities do not at all resemble the urban ideal projected
by the King of France onto the Place Royale in Nancy or Charleville, or the
Place des Vosges. There is thus a return to a type of architecture and an
urbanism that is close to the event, which for us today seems like a sort of
lost ideal, a lost model. All things being equal, it is against the same Des-
cartes who is startled at the fact that one was a child before being a man, and
who could not manage to think childhood, and who wished to overcome this
childhood at the architectural and urban level through a complete planning
of streets, of places, of dwellings – it is against him, in a certain way, that
today’s architecture tries to think when it tries to think, I would say, a child
city, a city in which the “birthing” of the dwelling is incomplete, and continues
to be incomplete. It is not made once and for all, and it is not a question of
respecting a plan that has already been made. On the contrary, it is a question
of allowing to happen what must happen – whatever happens – and of making
a place for it within a space that is necessarily fluctuating. I am not saying that
this is an ideal of the postmodern architecture that calls itself “postmodern”,
and which is infinitely more suspect; but in any case, I see very well how there
is something far too mature in the architectural models of … [word missing in
manuscript] or of Le Corbusier, and how, on the contrary, what we need today
is a child city, a child habitat in the sense that I just described, and in the sense
that, for example, Walter Benjamin describes in his Berlin Childhood. So that is
a first meaning associated with “immaterials”.

Next I would like to associate a second term with this word “immaterial”, the
term of the increate [incréer], or, if you prefer, the transitive. Let me remind
you that the initial plan for the exhibition gave it the title “New Materials and
Creation”, but that we realised that, when we speak of creation, creativity,
the creative society (as I have read recently, rather than consumer society),
creator, and even CAD – computer-aided design, but we might also say
computer-aided creation – we interpret the technological mutation with which
we are concerned (and also the historical change – we must not forget that
here) as being still, and only, modern; that is to say that basically we think that,
on the occasion of this particular technological mutation, man continues to
aim at the mastery of the world – and of himself of course – and that, having
made one more step forward in the means of this mastery, this control, he
effectively approaches the ideal of the creator. That this is a theological word
only reinforces what I say, for if it is true that modernity starts with Saint
Augustine, it is also true that it continues with Descartes. The difference
between the two is vast and yet slight, vanishing, since it goes without saying
36 30 Years after Les Immatériaux

that both of them imply a creative origin – a maternity, to use the word I used
before. The fact that this origin is called “God” in Saint Augustine and “ego” in
Descartes is of no great importance, for in both cases we remain within the
field of a thinking of a modernity which is that of a subject who creates his
world, for the ends of the arrangement of this world and the enjoyment of this
world, the enjoyment of knowing, of power; and that, fundamentally, if we
think the new technologies under the category of creation, if we continue to
maintain this idea as if all the new technologies did was to fulfil this desire, this
infinity of modern will that is called creation, then I believe we miss something
that is very important in this technological mutation, in this third technological
revolution, as it is known – namely, I would say, the prospect of the end of
anthropocentrism. In any case, this, to my eyes, is the prospect that we may
look towards on the occasion of this transformation, this greater intimacy of
intelligence and the world, of language and of things that the technologies in
question yield: that the counter-figure inscribed in modernity – the modern
counter-figure of modernity, that which precisely does not wish to follow the
paranoia of the subject dominating the totality of the mât – may emerge. If you
say creation, that means that you prohibit the other metaphysics that I evoked
earlier: a metaphysics in which, precisely, man is not a subject facing the world
of objects, but only – and this “only” seems to me to be very important – only a
sort of synapse, a sort of interactive clicking together of the complicated inter-
face between fields wherein particle elements flow via channels of waves; and
that if there is some greatness in man, it is only insofar as he is – as far as we
know – one of the most sophisticated, most complicated, most unpredictable,
and most improbable interfaces. You see that what I am indicating here is,
perhaps only for myself – and I apologise to my collaborators if so – that
on the occasion of these new technologies, perhaps there is a decline of
humanism, of the self-satisfaction of man within the world, of narcissism or
anthropocentrism, and that an end of humanism may emerge. And I must
say that for me it would be a great happiness in my latter years to observe
the decline of this most miserable aspect of miserable modernity; not only
because, as I have already said, this aspect has an extraordinarily high cost,
in blood, in violence, in terror and death; but also because, philosophically,
it is most impoverished. And if we really have to name names, then I would
say that the metaphysics that may emerge through these new technologies
would not be that of Descartes, but rather that of someone like Spinoza; or
if you prefer, a metaphysics that would be more along the lines of Zen – not
the Californian brand of Zen, but that of the great Zen tradition that is, for
me, incarnated in that great Japanese philosopher, living in China, called Ehei
Dôgen. This is what I mean when I say “interaction”. When I speak of inter-
action I don’t want to rehash that petty ideology that attempts to make up
for the inability of current media to allow the recipient to intervene in what
he sees or hears, and which then heralds interaction as a great triumph in
 After Six Months of Work... (1984) 37

the reinstatement of dialogue between transmitter and receiver, which I find

rather conceited – I have little faith in dialogue, for it, also, must be critiqued in
relation to its very Platonic origins. When I say interaction, what I am thinking
of is rather a sort of ontology of the endless transmission of messages which
are translated by each other, for better or worse, as much as possible, and
where man himself is not the origin of messages, but sometimes the receiver,
sometimes the referent, sometimes a code, sometimes a support for the
message; and where sometimes he himself is the message. This plasticity
of humans means that this structure of communication today seems like
something upon which identities can no longer be fixed: we can no longer
say that in the structure of communication man is, for example, in the role of
the sender any more than that of the receiver. With the advance of scientific
research – but also literary, philosophical, and artistic research – it seems
that he may occupy many places in this structure; so this is what I mean by
“interaction”.

I would now like to move on to a new group of associations around the theme
of time. The question of time will play a considerable role in the exhibition,
as I shall explain later on. And the group of associations that I have in mind
ultimately comprises, to simplify somewhat, two main tendencies which
are perfectly contradictory. On one hand we are concerned with these new
technologies, but also with the so-called postmodern society, in which we
maintain a relation to time that comes from modernity, and which is the
extension of the modern project of domination. Contemporary technologies
and the contemporary way of life aim to exert man’s mastery over time in
the same way that the modern project aimed, and still aims, to exert man’s
mastery over space. I would associate the immaterial with the immediate, in
the sense that mastery over time implies the abolition of any delay, and the
capacity to intervene here and now. The other tendency (I shall come back
to this point in a few moments), which is in perfect contradiction to the first
one – and to my mind this contradiction illustrates very specifically the con-
tradiction of postmodernity itself, which at once completes modernity, or at
least extends it, yet on the other hand contradicts and overturns it – the other
tendency in the relation of man to time today is that, precisely because of the
importance accorded to domination over time, and the value of immediacy,
man encounters probably more than ever his incapacity to dominate time
precisely insofar as time is not a material. It is difficult to conceive of space
without the bodies that occupy space, whereas time, on the contrary, can not
only be conceived of but even experienced without any body occupying time;
what occupies time is not bodies, and thus, in this sense, time is the form (to
speak like Kant) par excellence – or the medium, if you prefer – of immateriality.
In philosophy it used to be called “inner sense”, but obviously this is a term
that we can no longer use today. I will return to these two associations – the
association of immateriality with immediacy, and the counter-association of
38 30 Years after Les Immatériaux

immateriality with unmasterability. A first point: to master the object – what

I have called “mât” – the mind translates the properties of that object, or at
least those that are considered to be exploitable, and this is what the term
“project” means: that the object is addressed in view of exploitation, that
is to say in view of domination and usage. Therefore the mind translates
the properties judged to be exploitable in language, algebraic language for
example, and retranslates the equations obtained into geometrical properties
– at least this was the way in which the modern project proceeded. Thus space
– which is given spontaneously, naturally, through sight for example, but also
through hearing – space received in this way by the corporeal human subject
is replaced by a controlled space, one that is controlled via this procedure
of analysis, a procedure of translation into mathematical language, and a
procedure of synthesis that permits the re-translation of equations back
into lines and bodies, a procedure for passing from arithmetic and algebra
back into geometry and mechanics – this is a procedure already elaborated
by Galileo and Descartes. If we follow the line of this procedure, the ideal
pursued by this project of control and mastery in relation to time is the
capacity to intervene instantaneously in the object’s behaviour. We will be
able to say that the mastery of the object is complete if, as it evolves indepen-
dently, the observer or the worker can intervene immediately in its behaviour,
and intervene in such a way as to immediately carry out the task that the
observer or the worker judges appropriate. This means that the analysis of
the behaviour of the object, including unpredictable behaviour, and the syn-
thesis of orders to address this object, must occupy the least possible amount
of time. It is clear that cybernetics depends upon this principle, and that this
is why telematics and informatics count time in nanoseconds today, and will
soon count in picoseconds – 10–12 seconds – which on the human scale is
close enough to what we call immediacy. Machines that work on such time-
scales obviously make possible interactions in what we call “real time”; this is
the case, for example, with the Sogitec 4X machine invented at IRCAM, which
allows a composer to intervene in the production of synthesised music as it is
listened to. I would say that this kind of procedure – one of immediate inter-
vention – fully completes the programme of modern metaphysics, which is
also the programme of capitalism – namely, to gain time, to lose as little time
as possible. This means that the exhibition will have to show this conquest
of time, as we say, and will have to do this across a great many apparently
heterogeneous domains. For example, I think that we must use music as a
guiding thread here, for reasons that are easy to understand, because it is
an art of time, and it is therefore in music that, as if by accident, immaterials
have developed most rapidly. But I would very much like, for example, to
compare this musical research to financial research concerning the demateri-
alisation of money and the possibility of carrying out transactions that are
almost immediate, transactions that completely do away with the usual
 After Six Months of Work... (1984) 39

delays in realisation. This idea of immediate intervention is closely tied, as I

have said, to the very project of exchange in general – the idea of abridging
as far as possible the distance between the purchase of some goods and the
remittance of the corresponding sum. I don’t want to develop that aspect
here; I just want to say that fundamentally the conquest of now – the con-
quest of the instant, of the straightaway – realises a model of immediacy that
we find in what linguists call performativity. The classic example of a perfor-
mative phrase is that of the chairman of a meeting when he says “I declare
the meeting open”. It is enough for him to say “I declare the meeting open” in
order for the meeting to be open; that is to say that here we have an effective-
ness that is immediate in the sense that the phrase itself is the effectiveness:
it seems to describe a situation but in reality it brings it about; it brings it
about with no further mediation – without someone else needing to carry out
the order, for example. When we make a promise, it is the phrase itself that
performs its meaning, and thus we can say that with the performative we find
ourselves in immediacy par excellence. I would say that the modern project –
and in particular the capitalist project, insofar as it is, obviously, linked to the
model of exchange – is a project of the performative. It is a project of a time
that is entirely at the disposal of he who speaks, and who is in a position to
ensure the immediate effectiveness of that which is enunciated. The clas-
sical thinkers, in the ancient discussion, the “quarrel of the Ancients and the
Moderns”, reflected on the biblical phrase “let there be light, and there was
light”, regarding this as an entirely sublime case of immediacy. It seems to me
that this is precisely the project – or rather, the dream – of modernity; a dream
which, moreover, is closely linked to that of sublimity: its dream would be to
say “let there be the car, and there was the car; let there be petrol, and there
was petrol”. This, I think, is the idea that goes by the name of creation.

This model of performativity, which corresponds in a certain way to the

conquest of the now, implies a sort of priority of language, or in any case a
hegemonic predominance of oral language over written language: “I declare
the meeting open” is only performative at the moment and in the place where
it operates, in actual and punctual fashion; when you read in the minutes of
some meeting, or in a novel, that the chairman has said “I declare the meeting
open”, it does not follow that in your space-time as the reader, some meeting
is now open. The performative is always linked, obviously, to a particular
space-time, to a here and now which are those of the performative phrase
itself, and whose effectiveness is thus linked to the actual enunciation.
Whence the importance accorded in the current problematic to orality; not
only in the problematic, but, I would say, first and foremost in everyday life:
the importance given to the voice over written language is well known to
teachers and pedagogues; effects of neo-alphabetisation, of dyslexia, are
produced by the predominant use of the telephone, of television, of sound
film (I would also include tape recorders) – that is to say, materials that
40 30 Years after Les Immatériaux

transmit the voice in its orality, and which have real time effects. Film-makers
speak of the reality effect; one might speak of a reality effect of time through
oral language which, obviously, written language, language written in a book,
does not have; for there is no effect of performativity upon the reader when
he reads “I declare this meeting open”, whereas on the other hand, if he hears
it, he asks himself immediately what meeting has been opened. Perhaps these
voice-transmitting materials, this precipitation that I have supposed to be
taking place, without being able to attest to it myself, also account for certain
changes in language through the loss or withdrawal of the written linguistic
referent that might slow down important displacements in language use.
Thus, from this performative model, this predominance of articulated
language, there follows a sort of predominance of the general attitude of
reading. By reading I mean not the decipherment of a text in the space that we
call the page, but something a little different: when, for example, we query a
server, on Minitel for example – let’s take the simplest possible example – the
server sends pages to the screen which we read and in which we seek the
information we’re after. This is an exercise in reading, we read page after page;
but this reading, precisely, is not properly speaking a vision, not if we take
vision in a strong sense. It is rather of the order of hearing; and as proof, I
would draw your attention to the fact that a natural voice or a synthetic voice
could very well transmit this readable message were we not able to read it. Of
course this means that the text would be interpreted by an actor, by a reader
– potentially by a robot reader – thus it is very much an art, but it is an art of
time, of the same order as that of music. If, rather than a text, on the screen
page or on any surface whatsoever, you have an image – this is what I call
visible – it gives rise to a vision; and with something like that the voice
– whether robotic or human – cannot reinstate the image for you; by reinstate
I mean that when you see the image, you do not read it, you do not hear it. Of
course the voice can speak to you of the image, but it cannot speak the image
as it speaks a text. In this sense, the traits that form the synthetic letters of
our system of writing are incomparable with the traits that form images, even
those of so-called ideographic languages. And in this sense, I would oppose
vision and hearing as image and language, and of course as space and time. In
front of their screens, humans – contrary to what we might think – cease to be
lookers and become readers – that is to say, essentially, listeners. In this way,
we find ourselves confronting the opposition between the arts of time and the
arts of space, I would say a practice of time and a practice of space – between,
let us say, music and painting, in short. When I say between music and
painting, I mean that voiced, articulated language and music and cinema are
an art of time, and that when we pass from the pen and pencil to the keyboard
for reading/writing, passing by way of the word-processor keyboard, which
had already begun this mutation, we go from a mode that spatialises
inscription – as is always the case in painting, and the first writing is a variety
 After Six Months of Work... (1984) 41

of painting – toward a mode that temporalises inscription. This means that the
signifier in this second modality is organised in a chain all of whose elements
are not actualisable at once – in the blink of an eye, as we say – as is the case
for an image, but only successively – or, as linguists say, diachronically. The
screen pages themselves scroll, and when a writer works on a word processor
– something that we are also including in this exhibition – the important thing,
especially if he is used to working with a pen, is that this writer loses his
manuscript page, he loses all the preparatory work where additions are
inscribed; the emendations, erasures, and mistakes which are there together
in the preparatory text all disappear and give way to a text that itself may also
be preparatory, but which is potential – I mean that it is not there to hand, you
can’t put all the edited pages next to each other to get a view of the whole; you
have to bring up one by one this or that past page which has been memorised
in your machine. Instead of a preparatory text it is a potential text, a text that
is a future text because it is in the process of fabrication, but one which, on
the other hand, is more past than the manuscript is, because you can only
recall it page by page, to revise and correct it. You cannot have it here, now, en
bloc; it is never there, any more than a film is ever there as a whole. This also
means that, at the keyboard and before the screen, we have an experience of
time rather than of space. Bizarrely, this predominance of time signifies a sort
of preeminence of movement over rest. Space as the site of inscription –
above all the space of painting or of hieroglyphics, hierographics in general – is
linked to rest, time is linked to movement. The paradoxes of time are
paradoxes of movement, and in a hegemony of reading, like that which I have
just described very clumsily, we might say that space is itself but a particular
case of time, that is to say that rest – the simultaneous grasping of a visual
whole by the eye (a relative rest, since we all know that the eye is in fact very
active and is itself always in movement, but the movement is not in the object,
the movement is in the eye) – this rest itself is a particular case of movement.
You can stop your screen-page to register it in a more stable, slower way, for
example, to change speeds as one does with the procession of frames at the
cinema; but regardless, the frame itself can only be taken as an extreme case
of non-movement, the only universal case being movement (by movement, I
repeat, I understand the movement of the object, by virtue of the same
principle as in music, where it goes without saying that it is the movement of
vibrations that constitute the object to be understood). Now, if there is no
such rest to be grasped in these technologies – if, on the contrary, these
technologies at once constantly record and utilise movement, and only
movement – then it follows that in a certain sense nothing can be grasped in
one go, nothing can take place at the same time. Vision can grasp an actual
whole at the same time – at least this is a prejudice we have always had
– whereas listening never happens at the same time: listening to a piece of
music, even a short phrase, cannot take place all in one go. The phrase is not
42 30 Years after Les Immatériaux

present all at once. The very notion of the “blow”, in this regard – as in the
expression “at one blow” – must be re-examined, since what we call the “blow”
– if we wish to think it here as it takes place, for example, in reflections on
internal time-consciousness – the “blow” of the arrival of a musical note for
example, is an event, a temporal event: something happens. What is this
something that happens? It arrives too soon and too late, meaning that,
insofar as it is not there, it is not there, and as soon as it is there, it is no longer
there as event, it is there as memory, immediate memory. One might say in
relation to the event what Freud said about the traumatic event: a traumatic
event is one in which our affectivity is struck and marked by certain dis-
positions – neurotic dispositions, for example, or certain phantasms – and, as
Freud says, this requires two blows, not just one. It takes a first blow in which
the event is impressed without being recorded, we might say, by the uncon-
scious; and then a second blow in which, on the contrary, an analogue of the
traumatising event makes itself known as traumatising when it is not so in
itself, but only by analogy with the first blow. In this doubling of the blow lies
the whole secret of the fact that time escapes us, that the time of an event
itself escapes us, that we are immanent to this time that we cannot master,
and that, in this sense, immaterials are both threatening as imminences, and at
the same time are unnmasterable.

I would now like to associate the term immaterial with another neighbouring
term, that of the unsexuated or transsexuated; by this I mean that, in the con-
tradictory notion of the immaterial, there is not only the attempt to show
that, in these technologies and in this postmodern history, the voluntarist and
perfectly materialist project of modernity turns back in a sort of dispossession
of will and a dematerialisation of the object; but also that a sort of echo, a sort
of consonance is produced in this reversal of the situation which, it seems to
me, is specifically postmodern: transsexualism. insofar as transsexuals are in a
relation to that referent [matière] that is sex. By referent [matière] I mean that
obligatory reference of the message that is our body, above all our socialised
body, in the sense that the body qua message teaches us something about
sex, teaches us something about what sex we are, and where unfortunately
one does not have any choice beyond that of being a man or a woman. Now,
the phenomenon of transsexuality – which has of course developed thanks to
the progress of medicine, which has developed on a superficial level insofar
as we now see it taking place, but which certainly expresses a desire that is
very old and very profound, a dream – this phenomenon of transsexualism
certainly manifests the indecency of immateriality precisely in the sense that
it denies the alternative “man or woman” in regard to the sexual significance
of the corporeal message. Just as technology and immaterials are incredulous
in regard to the opposition between subject and object, I would say that they
also make us incredulous in relation to sexual difference. In any case, they
allow this incredulity in regard to sexual difference to become visible, beyond
 After Six Months of Work... (1984) 43

the equality of the sexes demanded by feminist movements. Wouldn’t the true
aim of these movements – or in any case the true postmodern aim – rather
be the disappearance of the alternative, the transaction between the two
sexes, the constitution of a sort of synthetic product? To understand what I
am saying here one could do no better than to read a passage from Catherine
Millot’s book Horsexe: Essays on Transexuality, which expresses what I want to
say marvellously:

I shall call him Gabriel, after the archangel, in conformity with his desire
to be pure spirit only. He was the only one to take the initiative of talking
with me. Aware that I had already seen a number of female transsexuals,
he phoned me one day to tell me that he wanted to meet me in order to
get the truth about transsexuality straight. He feared that the others had
misled me, and wished to rid me of my illusions, for he could not bear the
idea of people “talking any old rubbish about transsexuality”. He arrived
wearing a man’s suit (transsexuals generally prefer traditional dress;
more informal clothes are sexually less marked), a goatee beard, and was
unquestionably masculine in his bearing and his voice. Straight away he
declared, “The truth about transsexuality is that, in contrast to what they
claim – that their souls are imprisoned in bodies of the opposite sex –
transsexuals are neither men nor women, but something else”.

This is a quote from Gabriel. Millot adds that it is this difference that Gabriel
wants to be accepted, then she lets him speak:

Transsexuals are mutants, different from women when one is all woman,
and different from men when one is all man. I feel and I know that I am
not a woman, and I have the impression that I am not a man either. The
others are playing a game, they are playing at being men.1

Gabriel, she adds, has never felt like she is a man, but that it was because
he was sure of not feeling like a woman that he was called a man. The
unhappiness of transsexuals is that there is no third term, no third sex; and
according to him, society bears the main responsibility for this bipolarity
whose constraints transsexuals suffer from. I would say that – or rather, I will
let Catherine Millot say it:

This aspiration towards a third sex is far more common than transsexual
stereotypes would seem to suggest. Some female transsexuals stick to
their manly pretensions, but in many cases this claim masks a hope of
escaping the duality of the sexes. Transsexuals want to belong to the sex
of angels. 2

1 Catherine Millot, Horsexe: Essays on Transsexuality, trans. Kenneth Hylton (New York:
Autonomedia, 1990), p. 129–130.
2 Ibid., p. 126.
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
1640 Vsus et a longo tempore iura parit;
Immoque nature si nos de iure loquamur,
Hoc in presbiteris splendet vbique magis:408
Et si sub forma tali sint iura creanda,
Legis quod vires longior vsus habet,
Tunc puto presbiteros ex vsu condere leges,
Oscula dum crebro dant in amore suo.
E c c l e s i e gremium notat ordo presbiterorum,
Quo debent animas rite fouere bonas;
Quomodo set proprias qui non curant, alienas
1650 Curabunt? non est hoc racionis opus.
Nescio quid meriti poterunt tales michi ferre,
Qui sibi nil proprie commoditatis habent:
Nam peccatores scitur quod non deus audit,
Est inhonesta deo laus set ab ore mali:
Indeuota deo qui verba precancia confert,
Iudicii proprii dampna futura petit.
Qui dampnum causat, hic dampna dedisse videtur,
Ledit qui patitur que reuocare potest:
Infligit mortem languenti, qui valet illam
1660 Nec vult auferre, set sinit esse malum:
Presul qui laicos, cum non sint ordine digni,
Ordinat ad sacra, scandala plura mouet.
Tales si quis emit lucro, frustrabitur inde,
Aut si perdet in hiis scit magis ipse deus.
Hoc scio, quod panem qui fregerit esurienti,
Cuius debilitas est sine fraude patens,
Qui nudos operit, infirmos visitat, illi
Debentur merita pro bonitate sua:
Set qui sunt fortes, vanaque sub ordinis vmbra
1670 Conspirant requiem quam sibi mundus habet,
Errat eos presul sacrans, et quosque locando
Tales de merito perdere dona puto.

Hic tractat causam, quare accidit quod laici,

quasi iuris amici, luxurie presbiterorum
 consuetudinem abhorrentes, eam multociens
castigantes grauiter affligunt.

Hoc dicit clerus, quod, quamuis crimine plenus

Capm. xxii.
Sit, non est laici ponere crimen ei;
Alter et alterius cleri peccata fauore
Excusat, quod in hiis stat sine lege reus.
Non accusari vult a laicis, tamen illos
Accusat, que sibi libera frena petit.
Libera sunt ideo peccata placencia clero,
1680 Sit nisi quod laici iura ferantur ibi.
Presbiter insipiens populum facit insipientem,
Et mala multa parit qui bona pauca sapit:
Clerus lege carens populum dat lege carentem,
Sic parat et causam presbiter ipse suam:
Nam quia lege caret laicus, sine lege
manentem
Ignorat clerum, quem videt esse reum.
Si foret et sapiens clerus, sapiencia plebis
Staret, vt in lege perstet vterque simul;
Set quia iam fatui patet insipiencia cleri,
1690 Despicitur vita desipientis ita.
Pluribus exemplis natura iuuat racionem,
Doccius vnde suum iudiciale regat.
Hinc est quod latitans bubo lucis iubar odit,
Escam vestigat nocte, veretur aues:
In quam forte greges auium si lumina figant,409
Conclamando volant et laniando secant.
Presbiteros notat iste reos, qui corpore fedi
Que sunt luxurie feda latenter agunt;
Hos laici quasi lucis aues restringere querunt,
1700 Zelo succensi legis, amore dei.
Preuaricatus enim Iudas non amplius inde
Seruorum Cristi dignus honore fuit.
Dum iuga luxurie supportat presbiter, ipsum
Si pungant laici, computet i n d e s i b i.
Iusto iudicio lex vult, quod iuris abusor
 Amittat vicio quod sibi iura dabant.
Ecclesie fratres in Cristo nos sumus omnes,
Semper et alterius indiget alter ope:
Lex tamen hoc dicit, frater quod si tuus erret,
1710 Corripe, sic et eum fac reuenire deo:
Si te non audit, dic ecclesie, set et illam
Si non audire vult, nec adheret ei,
Amplius ille tibi velut Ethnicus est reputandus,
Quo sibi de culpa parcere nullus habet.
Presbiter ergo suis assistens cotidianis
Peccatis nullo debet honore frui:
Non erit exemptus, nam qui neque iura veretur,
Non est iusticie quod quis honoret eum:
Qui contra legem vetitis presumpserit vti,
1720 Debet concessis lege carere bonis.
Omne quod occultum latet, vlteriore patebit
Fine, nec excusat ordo vel ille status.
Dic, sibi quid valuit tunc excusacio ficta,
Dum foliis fici se male texit Adam?
Quid valet aut, culpam carnis si presbiter vmbra
Contegat ipse sui fultus honore status?

Hic scribit contra hoc quod aliqui presbiteri

dicunt, qualiter ipsi in carnis luxuriam
committendo non grauius hominibus laicis
deum offendunt.

Dicunt presbiteri, non te peccant magis ipsi,

Capm xxiii.
Dum carnis vicio fit sua victa caro:
Sicut sunt alii fragili de carne creati,
1730 Dicit quod membra sic habet ipse sua.
‘Sum velut alter homo,’ dicit ‘cur tunc mulieres,
Sicut habent alii, non retinebo michi?’
Argumenta sui sic criminis ipse refingit,
Liber et est vicio, dicit, vt alter homo.
Hec tamen, vt credo, fingit contraria vero,
 Nam magis est sanctus omnibus ille status.
Ex improuiso sumi reliqus valet ordo,
Quo minor est culpa, si cadat inde rea;
Assumi subito set presbiteri sacer ordo
1740 Non valet, immo suas spectat habere vices.
Nam per quinque gradus scandit prius, estque
probatus,
Quolibet vnde suum preuidet ipse statum:
Omnis et inde gradus a presule sanctificatus
Est et non alio, sanccior vt sit eo.
Per caput atque manus est crismate presbiter
vnctus,
Vt sit ob hoc aliis dignus in orbe magis;
Accipiensque iugum votum vouet ammodo
castum,410
Quo faciat munda mundior acta sua:
Et quia preuisa sic vota facit, puto culpa,
1750 Dum facit econtra, fert grauiora mala:
Qui daret exemplum virtutis et est viciosus,
Errat plus ducto ductor in ore meo.
Hiis circumspectis michi sic per singula causis,
Estimo presbiteros te magis esse reos.
Se licet excuset fingens sibi verba sacerdos,
Nulla sue mentis interiora iuuat;
Inmemor immo sacri quem ceperat ordinis, vltro
Scandala sic facti querit in orbe sui.
Non puto presbitero sutorem quod status vnit,
1760 Culpa nec in simili lance coequat eos:411
Presbiter et laicus non sunt Bercarius vnum,
Nec scelus in simili condicione grauat.
Castum se vouit sibi cum fuit vncta corona,
Stringitur et voto quisq u e fidelis homo.
Non foret hic tanti mercede locatus honoris,
Sit nisi quod maius inde subiret onus:
Nam nequit hoc facere rex est qui maior in orbe,
Quod minor in Cristo presbiter ipse potest:
Sic, quia de iure reliquis prefertur honore,
 1770 Ledit eum grauius crimine iuris onus.
Heu! quod iniqua manus mulierum feda pudendis
Debet in altari tangere sacra dei!
Qui corpus domini tractabit, et est meretrici
Turpiter attractus, Cristus abhorret opus.
Qui fierent Cristi serui, sunt dumque ministri
Demonis, heu! nostram quis reparabit opem?

Hic describit qualiter omnia et singula que

sacerdocii concernunt officium magne virtutis
misteria designant: et primo dicet de vestibus
sacerdotalibus ex vtraque lege competenter
dispositis.

O bene si penset que sunt sibi iura sacerdos,

Capm. xxiiii.
Quid sit honor, quid onus, quid vel honoris opus,
Singula qui iuste sibi ponderat, instat et eque,
1780 Res est mira nimis, si male gestet onus.
Omne quod ille status sibi vendicat esse beatum
Cernitur, vt sancti sint magis inde viri.
Non est tam modicum quod misse spectat ad
vsum,
Lege sacerdotum quin decet esse sacrum.
Ornatus varii, quibus vtitur ipse sacerdos,
Virtutis varie mistica signa gerunt.
Poderis est vestis, aliter que dicitur alba,
Presbiteri corpus que tegit vsque pedes:
Vt foris est albus, fieret sic albior intus
1790 Presbiter, vt mores gestet in orbe bonos.
Cinctus ephot Samuel domini studet esse minister,
Cui paruam tunicam texuit Anna parens:
In tunica tenui fidei doctrina notatur,
Qua tenues animos gracia mater alit:
Ex lino factum per ephot signatur honestas
Carnis, quam mundam presbiter ipse geret.
Balteus est eciam, tunicam qui stringit honeste,
 Ne femur in luxu facta pudenda sciat:
Fert humerale decens, vt nostras presbiter egras
1800 Confortans animas ad meliora ferat:
Et ligat in summo sapiens capitale sacerdos,
Vt capitis sensus non sinat ire vagos.
Infula vestit eum circumdata, que nitet auro,
Quod virtute sua cuncta metalla regit;
Splendet et in simili forma virtute sacerdos,
Si bene conseruet ordinis ipse statum:
Aurum veste gerit sanctus, cum splendet in illo
Pre reliquis rutilans clara sophia dei.
Ne tunice leuiter possit ruptura minari,
1810 Nobilis in giro texilis ora micat:
Se nec et ipse bonus disrumpat in orbe sacerdos,
Ne pateat rima criminis vlla sui.
Hac se mundicia precinctus presbiter ornat,
Vt totus mundus munera munda sacret.
Aron et electis vestes texuntur, vt horum412
Quisque sacerdotis possit honore frui:
Sic modo presbiteri, seu summi siue minores,
Efficiunt Cristi corpus idemque sacrant.
Nam nos cum vinum panemque sacramus in ara,
1820 Hoc verus sanguis vna fit atque caro:
Qui Cristi carnem matris confecit in aluo,
Corpus in altari conficit ille sacrum.
Quadra fit altaris species, vt quatuor orbis
Partibus ecclesie sit solidata fides.
Vestibus ornatus qui sic et moribus extat
Dignus, non aliter, presbiterandus erit.
Quos tante vestes, quos gloria tanta perornat,
Sint magis vt sancti causa requirit eos:
Dedecus ecclesie presul qui talia prestat
1830 Presbiteris laicis, iure negante, parit.
Quos sinus ecclesie recipit, noscat sinus aptos
Esse deo, reliquos euomat ipsa foris.
 Hic loquitur qualiter sacrificia de veteri lege
altari debita fuerunt in figura ad exemplum nunc
noue legis presbiterorum: dicit vlterius qualiter
ex vtraque lege sacrificantes altari debent esse
sine macula.

Capm. xxv.Lex vetus instituit animalia, de quibus olim

Immolat altari plebs holocausta deo;
Semper et ex omni mactato sic animali
Debita presbitero porcio certa fuit.
Hoc tamen ad Cristi legem latitante figura
Presbiteris nostris mistica iura notat.
Illa sacerdoti que spectat pars holocausti,
1840 Curatis nostris est memoranda satis:
Heeque sacerdotis sunt partes, pectus et armus
Diuisus dexter, lege iubente sacra.
Pectus doctrine locus est, nam quisque sacerdos
Debet subiectos recta docere suos:
Forcior est armus dexter, signatque quod eius
Actus sit fortis, nulla sinistra gerens:
Armus diuisus docet vt viuendo sacerdos
Excedat populum, nil populare gerens.
Non est tam modicum quid in ordine
presbiterorum,
1850 Grande ministerii quin sibi pondus habet;
Nam lex iuncta vetus cum lege noua manifestant
Vndique presbiteros quod decet esse sacros.
Petrus in Aurora que scribam scripsit, et ille
Testis in hac causa verus et auctor erit.
Lex vetus ista iubet, noua que confirmat, vt
omnis
Sacrificans aris inmaculatus erit;
Absque sui macula sit corporis actus et eius,
Displicet vnde deo, feda nec vlla gerat:
Non habeat maculam, nec sit mixtura reatus,
1860 Ne purum maculet accio praua bonum.
Que tamen hee macule dicuntur in ordine dicam,
 Presbiter vt lector sit magis inde memor.
Dicitur hic cecus, qui mundi puluere plenus413
Ad lumen vite carpere nescit iter:
Est lippus, cuius mens ingenio micat intus,
Set carnale tamen eius opacat opus:
Albugo cecat oculos, et denotat illum
Qui tumet, ascribens candida facta sibi:
Est paruo naso qui nec discernere parua
1870 Sufficit, et quod agit perficit absque sale:
Est nimio naso, qui non intelligit illud
Quod legit, et doctum se tamen ipse facit:
Est torto naso, qui dulce fatetur amarum,
Et sanctos actus iudicat esse malos:
Est claudus, qui nouit iter, set currere tardus
Heret in hoc mundo, carne ligante pedem:
Fractus pes et fracta manus reputatur in illo,
Qui claudo peior tardat ad omne bonum:
Hic est gibbosus, quem mundi sarcina curuat,
1880 Lumina nec cordis summa videre sinit:
Corporis in scabie succensa libido notatur,
Que corrupta suo crimine plura facit.
Predictis viciis si quis se senciat egrum,
Lex iubet vt panem non sacret ille deo.
Oza manus tendens accessit vt erigat archam,
Set nimis audacem mors fuit vlta manum:
Hinc ideo dicunt meruisse necem, quia nocte
Transacta cohitu coniugis vsus erat.
Declaratur in hoc, quod qui pollutus ad aram
1890 Accedat, mortis vulnere dignus erit:414
Experimenta docent, quod ab hoc detergere
sordes
Feda manus nescit, dum tenet illa lutum.
Presbiter est dictus prebens aliis iter, et si
Erret, tunc errant ducere quosque putat.
Dans sacra siue docens, notat ista loquela,
sacerdos
Si malus est, alii sunt magis inde mali.
 Non sine stat cura quicumque professus in huius
Ordinis est opere, si bene seruet opus:
Ergo prius videas qui scandere vis, et in illum
1900 Si scandas, facias que iubet ordo tuus:
Non solum faciem, mores set confer et artes,
Proficias curis ex quibus ipse tuis.

Hic loquitur quod etas sufficiens, priusquam

gradum sacerdocii sibi assumat, in homine
requiritur: loquitur eciam de suorum rasura
pilorum, et dicit quod talia in signum mundicie
et sanctitatis specialiter presbiteris conueniunt:
dicit vlterius quod presbiteri a bonis non debent
esse operibus ociosi.415

Quam prius assumat, matura requiritur etas,

Capm. xxvi.
Presbiter officium, plenus vt ipse regat:
Nam flos etatis temptanti congruit hosti;
Carnis et etatis feruet vterque calor:
Iam quos vexat ad huc tenere lasciuia carnis416
Improba, pastores non decet esse gregis.
Vt regnare deo possint, sibi rasa corona
1910 Restat, et vt facta nobiliora gerant.
Radices non extirpat rasura pilorum,
Set rasi crescunt multiplicando magis:
Sic licet expellas omnes de pectore motus,
Non tamen hec penitus cuncta fugare potes:
Non ita rasus eris, quin semper habet caro
pugnam;417
Intus habes cum quo prelia semper agas.
Si quando mundum fugias, a puluere mundi
Perfecte purus non potes esse tamen:
Nam, licet eniteas summis virtutibus, omnes
1920 Ex animo culpas non resecare vales.
Fit tamen ex minimis hec quam retines tibi culpa,
Ne tua mens tumeat, dum bona multa geris:418
 Ex tali culpa tibi soluitur ergo tributum,
Vt tua mens paueat labe remorsa breui.
Sepe cadit iustus, fragilis quia vir manet omnis,
Ne nimis exaltet gloria vana virum:
Qui leuiter cecidit, vt surgat forcius, ille
Casum felicem suscipit ante deum.
Lux estis mundi, set non penitus sine fumo,
1930 Nam sine peccato viuere nullus habet:
Sepe boni fructus post temptamenta sequntur,
Mercedemque suam prelia carnis habent.
Vtile nempe foret seuas extinguere flammas,
Et sanum vicii pectus habere tuum:
Ne videant oculi per quod temptentur, et aures
Obtura, vicii ne sonus intret ibi.
Tucius est aptumque magis discedere pace,
Ponere quam bellum, vincere quale nequis:
Integer est melior nitidus gladiator in armis,
1940 Quam cum tela suo sanguine tincta madent:
Inque dei missis nitidus sine labe sacerdos
Victor in hoc placidum fert sibi lucra deum.
Quale sit hoc quod amas celeri circumspice
mente,
Et tua lesuro subtrahe colla iugo:
Debet homo sapiens nascentes pellere morbos,
Inueniet tardam ne sibi lentus opem:
Opprime, dum noua sunt, subiti mala semina
morbi,
Et tuus incipiens ire resistat equs;
Nam mora dat vires, teneras mora conficit vuas,
1950 Et validas segetes quod fuit herba facit.
Si Venus agreditur, tibi sit magis aspera vita,
Flamma recens modica sepe retardat aqua.
Vt corpus redimas, ferrum pacieris et ignem,
Quantum fert anime plus medicina tue.
Ocia si tollas, periere Cupidinis arcus,
Extincteque iacent et sine luce faces.
Vt non delinquas, debes imponere culpe
 Frena, vagos gressus, ocia queque fugans.
Presbiteros opere de re sibi que sit honesta,
1960 Aut se de precibus sollicitare decet:
Fecit enim sportas, vt frangeret ocia, Paulus,
Namque vagans aliquo noluit esse modo.
Ex requie cerpit pestis seuissima luxus,419
Armiger et fame prodigus hostis honor:
Ex requie sequitur infortunata voluptas,
Pauperies anime, criminis omne nephas.
Luxuriant animi varia sub ymagine moti,
Saltem virtutis dum caro nescit opus:
Vtile nempe dabit deus omne viris operosis,
1970 Debet mercedis pondera ferre labor.
Sollicitudo decet animam discreta, labores
Dum subit, vt vicia carne domare queat:
Sollicitudo iuuat corpus, perquirat vt illa
Victum, quo licitis viuat in orbe modis:
Ocia dumque caro petit et torpet labor exul,
In scelus ex solito more paratur iter.
Demon femineos et molles diligit actus,
Quando viri virtus omne virile negat;
Ocia quippe nocent in talibus absque labore,
1980 Quorum Cristicolis non valet esse salus.
Culpa quidem longe facit esse deo, prope virtus;
Displicet ista deo, placat et illa deum.

Hic loquitur de presbiterorum dignitate

spirituali, et qualiter hii, si bene agant sua
officia, plus aliis proficiunt: sinautem, de suis
malis exemplis delinquendi magis ministrant
occasiones.

Capm. xxvii. Presbiteri fit magnus honor maiorque potestas,

Si procul a viciis sit pius atque bonus.
Hii sacramenti manibus misteria summi
Tractant, quo verbo fit caro iuncta deo:
 Hiique scelus lauacro baptismi tollere sancto
Possunt, quo primus corruit ipse parens:
Hii quoque lege noua celebrant sponsalia nostra,
1990 Et si iura petunt cassaque nulla ferunt:
Hii quoque confessis veniam prestant residiuis,420
Errantique viro dant remeare deo:
Hii quoque celestem nobis dant sumere panem,
Post et in extremis vnccio spectat eis:
Hii quoque defunctis debent conferre sepultis,
Inque sua missa reddere vota pia.
Hii sunt sal terre, quo nos condimur in orbe,
Absque sapore suo vix salietur homo.
In sale, quod misit in aquas, Heliseus easdem421
2000 Sanat, nec remanet gustus amarus eis:
In sale signatur prudens discrecio iusti,
Vt discretus homo condiat inde suos.
Hii sunt lux mundi, quapropter si tenebrosi
Sint, tunc nos ceci stamus in orbe vagi.
Dans offendiculum ceco quo leditur vllum
Vt deus instituit, hic maledictus erit:
Ceco preponit obstacula, qui maledicta
Peccandi prebet per sua facta viam.
Hii sunt scala Iacob tangens celestia summa,422
2010 Plena satis gradibus, vnde patebit iter:
Hii sunt mons sanctus, per quos conscendere
debet
Virtutum culmen quisque fidelis homo:
Hii sunt consilium nostrum, via recta superne,
Legis doctores, et noua nostra salus:
Hii claudunt celum populo, reserant et apertum,
Possunt hiique boni subdere cuncta sibi.
‘Crescite,’ dicitur hiis, ‘et multum reddite fructum’;
Pertinet ad mores ista loquela bonos:
Dicitur hiis, ‘Terram replete’; nota tibi dictum:
2020 Plenus in ecclesia fructibus esto bonis.
Ante deum vacuus nemo veniet, quia nullus
Expers virtutis debet adesse deo.
 Sic placare deo iustosque reosque sacerdos
Debet, et ad celos fundere thura precum:
Oret ne iustus a iusticia cadat, oret
Vt prauus surgat et mala prima fleat.
O quam res vilis, dum presbiter est vt asellus,
Moribus indoctus, et sine lege rudis!
In numero sunt presbiteri celi quasi stelle,
2030 Vix tamen ex mille si duo luce micant:
Scripta legunt nec scripta sciunt, tonsi tamen ipsi
A vulgo distant, quod satis esse putant.
Sunt tales; et sunt alii quos ardua virtus
Ornat in ecclesia, qui bona multa ferunt.
Emittit coruum Noe, non redit ille; columbam
Emittit, reditum missa columba facit:
Sic et in ecclesia sunt corui suntque columbe,
Sunt cum felle mali, sunt sine felle boni.
Cras primam cantant, cum se conuertere tardant,
2040 Set tollit tales sepe suprema dies:
Tales sunt pigri, quos mundi vincula nectunt,
Nec promissa dei regna sitire volunt.
Ordinis ipse sui qui seruat iura sacerdos,
Rebus et exemplis dogmata sancta docens,
Non honor est tantus, quo non sit in ordine dignus,
Laus sibi nec populi sufficit, immo dei:
In clero fateor, quos approbat ardua virtus,
Illorum merito gracia maior erit.

Postquam dixit de errore illorum qui inter

seculares sacerdocii ministerium sibi
assumpserunt, intendit dicere secundum
tempus nunc de errore scolarium, qui ecclesie
plantule dicuntur.

Capm. Nomine sub cleri cognouimus esse scolares,

xxviii.Ecclesie plantas quos vocat ipse deus.
2050 Orti diuini bonus extat planta scolaris,
 Ecclesie fructus que facit esse bonos.
Qui studet in morum causis et non viciorum,
Qui sibi nec mundum computat, immo deum,
Clericus ipse dei super hoc reputatur, et eius
Principium fine clauditur inde bono.
Summi doctoris virtutum regula iusta
Discipulos dociles de racione fouet:
Qui studiis herent, cor ad alta leuant et in altis
2060 Figunt, hii vera sunt holocausta deo.
Nunc tamen inter eos puto multos esse vocatos,
Electos paucos condicione probos:
Moribus hii dudum studii virtute vacabant,
Nunc viciis studia dant vigilare sua.
Vix pro materia si nunc studet vnus habenda,
Solum set forme sufficit vmbra sue.
Clericus ire scolas animo paciente solebat,
Gloria nunc mundi statque magistra sibi,
Discurrensque vagus potator et accidiosus,
2070 Deditus et veneri, circuit hic et ibi.
Ex planta sterili non fiet fertilis arbor,
Nec faciet fructus arbor iniqua bonos:
Sepe senecta tenet, tenuit quodcumque iuuentus;
Si malus est iuuenis, vix bonus ipse vetus.
Est bona que radix bonitatis germina profert,
De radice mala germinat omne malum.
Quisque suos igitur pueros castiget, vt illa
Virgula non licite mentis agenda fugat:
Qui virtutis habet iuuenis cum flore magistrum,
2080 Discat et ipse pie que probitatis erunt,
Proficiet talis; set quem doctor viciosus
Instruit, hic raro fructificabit homo.

Hic querit causam que scolarium animos ad

ordinem presbiteratus suscipiendum inducit:
tres enim causas precipue allegat; tractat eciam
de quarta causa, que raro ad presens contingit.
 Sunt aliqui, studio modo qui perstant animoso,
Capm. xxix.
Nescio que causa sit tamen inde rea.
Quicquid agant homines, intencio iudicat omnes;
Corde quod interius est capit ipse deus:
Istis prepositis, verum michi pande, scolaris,
Dic que sit studii condita causa tui:
Muniri primo cum te facis ordine sacro,
2090 Cum te principiis presbiterare venis,
O que mente tua fuerit tunc mocio summa,
Hoc vel pro mundi sit vel amore dei?
Aut tu certa tue michi dic primordia cause,
Aut tibi que sapio dicere vera volo.
‘Sunt plures cause, per quas communis in
orbe423
Est sacer hic ordo carus vt ecce modo:
In prima causa fugio mundana flagella
Legis communis, que dat amara viris:
Vlterius video quod non sudore laboro,
2100 Ocia que quero sic et habere queo:
Te r c i a causa meum dat vestitum quoque victum;
Sicque meo placito persto quietus ego.
Ex hiis causata mea stat deuocio tota,
Qua poterit cerni rasa corona michi:
Hec est causa scole, ciuilia iura studere
Que facit, et logicam me docet arte suam.
Ipsa scoleque gradus michi dat conscendere
summos,
Sic et in ecclesiam scandere quero bonam:
Nam si fama viget, puto quod prebenda vigebit,
2110 Sicque vacare libris est labor ipse leuis.
Sic sacer ordo michi placet, et sic litera cleri
Confert, dum studio pinguia lucra gero.
Nunc causas dixi, constat quibus ordo scolari,
Sic propter mundum me reor esse reum;
Nam michi nil melius, dum sufficit ipsa facultas,
Estimo, quam mundi gaudia ferre michi.’
Est set adhuc causa melior tamen omnibus, illa
 Qua scola discipulum gaudet habere bonum.
Hec solet antiquis, non nostris stare diebus,
2120 Que de virtute concipit acta scole.
Nuper erant mundi qui contempsere beati
Pompas, et summum concupiere bonum;
Et quia scire scolas acuit mentes fore sanctas,
Scripture studiis se tribuere piis.
Non hos ambicio, non hos amor vrget habendi,
Set studio mores conuenienter eunt:
Hii contemplantes celum terrena negabant,
Causa voluptatis nulla remouit eos:
Hii neque serviciis optabant regis inesse,
2130 Nec foris in plebe nomen habere Rabi:
Hos neque precellens superabat comptus inanis
Nec vini luxus, nec mulieris amor:
Moribus experti dederant exempla futuris,
Que sibi discipulus debet habere scolis.
Nunc tamen in v i c i u m v i r t u s
c o n u e r t i t u r , e t que
Nuper erant mores turpia plura gerunt:
Que modo scripta dei dicunt se discere laudi,
In laudem mundi vertit auarus honor.
O res mira nimis! legit et studet ipse scolaris
2140 Mores, dum vicia sunt magis acta sua:
Sic quia stat cecus morum sine lumine clerus,
Erramus laici nos sine luce vagi.

FOOTNOTES:
340 Heading Hic incipit exquo L Incipit prologus libri tercii om. L
341 9 set et S (et in later hand)
342 13 vulgus] populus (ras.) C
343 16 Vt sit D Sit sic L
344 46 conciliumque H
345 58 malo C
346 69 poteruntque C
347 90 Quodque prius D Quod prius L
348 In place of Incipit &c., L has here the four lines ‘Ad mundum
mitto,’ with picture below: see p. 19.
349 4* exempla D humus] mundus DL
350 18* eum] ei D enim L
351 22* ille CD ipse HGEL
352 27* poterint D
353 1** regentes H₂
354 4** mundit T
355 24** ipse] ille H₂
356 58 periat HCGL
357 81 Marcenarius G mercennarius E
358 86 Glebas D
359 141 ipseque D
360 176 ouis CEHGDLH₂ onus ST
361 193 possint D
362 Heading Hic loquitur quomodo de legibus positiuis quasi
cotidie noua instituuntur nobis peccata, quibus tamen
priusquam fiant prelati propter lucrum dispensant, et ea fieri
libere propter aurum permittunt LTH₂ (Hic quomodo
diligentibus positiuis ... prius fiant &c. L liberi LT)
363 229 numquam L vnquam D
364 258 iugum] suum C
365 273 Dum S Cum CEHDL
366 300 gerarchiam SHT Ierarchiam CL ierarchiam ED
367 Heading 2 dicitur tamen nunc D dicitur tamen L
368 351 vinximus SDL vincimus CEHG
369 375 ff. marginal note om. ELTH₂L₂
370 375 margin hic om. S
371 margin in guerris S guerris CHGD
372 380 margin spoliantes S om. CHGD
373 379 neque C
374 401 reperare S reparare CED
375 454 cotinuatque H
376 462 saruat H
377 Heading deuincant EL deuincat SCHD
378 516 Solennes CEL Solemnes D
379 536 Hec DL
380 546 sit CE
381 561 No paragraph S
382 Cap. ix Heading 2 nec decet CEDL
383 579 sceptrum C
384 595 tetram CEH terram SGDL
385 617 No paragr. CE
386 633 sunt vmbra velud (velut) fugitiua CEG sunt fugitiua velut
vmbra L
387 641 piper vrtice om. D (blank)
388 685 Ne C
389 Heading 2 incontrarium S
390 840 lucri] dei EHT
391 934 ruet CH
392 989 sit] sic S
393 1124 Et CEGDL Est SHTH₂
394 1149 subectos S
395 1214 ad hec CEHGDTH₂ ad hoc L et hec S
396 1265 fallit S
397 1374 timuisse EHL
398 1376 vngat vt D vngat et SCEHGL
399 1454 plus sibi sensus hebes est SGDL fit sibi sensus hebes
CEHTH₂
400 1498 Nec CE
401 1518 circueuntis C
402 1533 Est et S Est sed (set) CEHGL Est set et D
403 1541 Durior CEHGDLT Durius S
404 1552 modicicum S
405 Heading 1 Qostquam S
406 2 iam om. S
407 1617 solennia CEDL
408 1642 Hoc S Hec CEHGDL
409 1695 si CEHGDLTH₂ sua S
410 1747 vouet CEHGT vouit SDLH₂
411 1760 nec in simili conditione grauat (om. ll. 1761 f.) C
412 1815 Aaron CED
413 1863 puluere CEH vulnere SGDL
414 1890 Accedat SL Accedit CEHGD
415 Heading 5 f. a bonis non debent operibus esse CE a bonis
operibus non debent esse L a bonis operibus non esse D
416 1907 ad huc SGT adhuc CEHDL
417 1915 pugnam CEHL pungnam SGT pinguam D
418 1922 Nec C timeat EDL
419 1963 serpit CE
420 1991 residiuis SET recidiuis CHDL
421 1999 Helizeus C Helyseus EL
422 2009 No paragr. S
423 2095 No paragr. S
 Exquo tractauit de errore cleri, ad quem
precipue nostrarum spectat regimen animarum,
iam intendit tractare de errore virorum
Religiosorum: et primo dicet de Monachis, et
aliis bonorum temporalium possessionem
optinentibus; ordinis vero illorum sanctitatem
commendans, illos precipue qui contraria
faciunt opera redarguit.

Incipit liber Quartus.

Capm. i. Sunt et Claustrales diuerse condicionis,

De quibus vt sapio scribere pauca volo.
Actus vt ipse probat, quosdam possessio signat,
Quosdam pauperies, set similata nimis.
Est bona religio de se, set religionem
Qui fallunt, tales dicimus esse malos:
Qui bene sub claustro viuunt fore credo beatos,
Quos mundanus amor nescit habere reos;
Quique manus aratro mittunt nec respicientes
10 Retro, viros sanctos ordo notabit eos.
Est deus in monachis, sunt et commercia celi
Hiis, sine qui mundo claustra subire volunt.
Cum quis amare duo pariter contraria sumit,
Alterius vires subtrahit alter amor:424
Sic qui presumunt facies laruare sub vmbra
Ordinis, et mundi crimina subtus agunt,
Talibus ipse mea fero scripta, nec alter ab ipsis
Leditur, immo suum quisque reportet onus.
Est nichil ex sensu proprio quod scribo, set ora
20 Que michi vox populi contulit, illa loquar.
Sunt etenim monachi, possessio quos titulauit,
Quidam, quos nullis moribus ordo ligat;
Nam possessores aliqui sic ocia querunt
Ordinis, vt nequeunt vlla nociua pati:
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